Preaching  and  Paganism. 

% 

By  Albert  Parker  Fitch. 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 


WORKS  BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


THE  COLLEGE  COURSE  AND  THE  PREPARATION 
FOR  LIFE 

CAN  THE  CHURCH  SURVIVE  IN  THE  CHANGING 
ORDER? 


PUBLISHED  ON  THE  FOUNDATION 
ESTABLISHED  IN  MEMORY  OF 

JAMES  WESLEY  COOPER 
OF  THE  CLASS  OF  1865,  YALE  COLLEGE 


PREACHING  AND 
PAGANISM 

BY 
ALBERT  PARKER  FITCH 

PROFESSOR  OF  THE  HISTORY  OF  RELIGION 
IN  AMHERST  COLLEGE 


THE  FORTY-SIXTH  SERIES  OF  THE 

LYMAN  BEECHER  LECTURESHIP  ON  PREACHING 

IN  YALE  UNIVERSITY 


NEW  HAVEN 

YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
MDCCCCXX 


COPYRIGHT,  1920,  BY 
YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 


FIRST  PUBLISHED,   1920 


JJV 


THE  JAMES  WESLEY  COOPER 
MEMORIAL  PUBLICATION  FUND 

The  present  volume  is  the  fourth  work  published  by 
the  Yale  University  Press  on  the  James  Wesley  Cooper 
Memorial  Publication  Fund.  This  Foundation  was  es- 
tablished March  30,  1918,  by  a  gift  to  Yale  University 
from  Mrs.  Ellen  H.  Cooper  in  memory  of  her  husband, 
Rev.  James  Wesley  Cooper,  D.D.,  who  died  in  New 
York  City,  March  16,  1916.  Dr.  Cooper  was  a  member 
of  the  Class  of  1865,  Yale  College,  and  for  twenty-five 
years  pastor  of  the  South  Congregational  Church  of 
New  Britain,  Connecticut.  For  thirty  years  he  was  a 
corporate  member  of  the  American  Board  of  Commis- 
sioners for  Foreign  Missions  and  from  1885  until  the 
time  of  his  death  was  a  Fellow  of  Yale  University,  serv- 
ing on  the  Corporation  as  one  of  the  Successors  of  the 
Original  Trustees. 


TO 
MY  WIFE 


PREFACE 

THE  chief,  perhaps  the  only,  commendation  of 
these  chapters  is  that  they  pretend  to  no  final 
solution  of  the  problem  which  they  discuss. 
How  to  assert  the  eternal  and  objective  reality  of  that 
Presence,  the  consciousness  of  Whom  is  alike  the  begin- 
ning and  the  end,  the  motive  and  the  reward,  of  the 
religious  experience,  is  not  altogether  clear  in  an  age  that, 
for  over  two  centuries,  has  more  and  more  rejected  the 
transcendental  ideas  of  the  human  understanding.  Yet 
the  consequences  of  that  rejection,  in  the  increasing  in- 
dividualism of  conduct  which  has  kept  pace  with  the 
growing  subjectivism  of  thought,  are  now  sufficiently 
apparent  and  the  present  plight  of  our  civilization  is  al- 
ready leading  its  more  characteristic  members,  the  politi- 
cal scientists  and  the  economists,  to  reexamine  and  re- 
appraise the  concepts  upon  which  it  is  founded.  It  is  a 
similar  attempt  to  scrutinize  and  evaluate  the  significant 
aspects  of  the  interdependent  thought  and  conduct  of  our 
day  from  the  standpoint  of  religion  which  is  here  at- 
tempted. Its  sole  and  modest  purpose  is  to  endeavor  to 
restore  some  neglected  emphases,  to  recall  to  spiritually 
minded  men  and  women  certain  half-forgotten  values  in 
the  religious  experience  and  to  add  such  observations  re- 
garding them  as  may,  by  good  fortune,  contribute  some- 
thing to  that  future  reconciling  of  the  thought  currents 
and  value  judgments  of  our  day  to  these  central  and 
precious  facts  of  the  religious  life. 

ii 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

Many  men  and  minds  have  contributed  to  these  pages. 
Such  sources  of  suggestion  and  insight  have  been  indi- 
cated wherever  they  could  be  identified.  In  especial  I 
must  record  my  grateful  sense  of  obligation  to  Professor 
Irving  Babbitt's  Rousseau  and  Romanticism.  The  chapter 
on  Naturalism  owes  much  to  its  brilliant  and  provocative 
discussions. 


12 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface    11 

I.  The  Learner,  the  Doer  and  the  Seer 15 

II.  The  Children  of  Zion  and  the  Sons  of  Greece  40 

III.  Eating,  Drinking  and  Being  Merry 72 

IV.  The  Unmeasured  Gulf   ,  102 

V.  Grace,  Knowledge,  Virtue 131 

VI.  The  Almighty  and  Everlasting  God 157 

VII.  Worship  as  the  Chief  Approach  to  Tran- 
scendence      184 

VIII.  Worship  and  the  Discipline  of  Doctrine  ....  209 


CHAPTER  ONE 
The  Learner,  the  Doer  and  the  Seer 

THE  first  difficulty  which  confronts  the  incum- 
bent of  the  Lyman  Beecher  Foundation,  after 
he  has  accepted  the  appalling  fact  that  he  must 
hitch  his  modest  wagon,  not  merely  to  a  star,  but  rather 
to  an  entire  constellation,  is  the  delimitation  of  his  sub- 
ject. There  are  many  inquiries,  none  of  them  without 
significance,  with  which  he  might  appropriately  concern 
himself.  For  not  only  is  the  profession  of  the  Christian 
ministry  a  many-sided  one,  but  scales  of  value  change 
and  emphases  shift,  within  the  calling  itself,  with  our 
changing  civilization.  The  mediaeval  world  brought 
forth,  out  of  its  need,  the  robed  and  mitered  ecclesiastic ; 
a  more  recent  world,  pursuant  to  its  genius,  demanded 
the  ethical  idealist.  Drink-sodden  Georgian  England 
responded  to  the  open-air  evangelism  of  Whitefield  and 
Wesley ;  the  next  century  found  the  Established  Church 
divided  against  itself  by  the  learning  and  culture  of 
the  Oxford  Movement.  Sometimes  a  philosopher  and 
theologian,  like  Edwards,  initiates  the  Great  Awakening; 
sometimes  an  emotional  mystic  like  Bernard  can  arouse 
all  Europe  and  carry  men,  tens  of  thousands  strong, 'over 
the  Danube  and  over  the  Hellespont  to  die  for  the  Cross 
upon  the  burning  sands  of  Syria;  sometimes  it  is  the 
George  Herberts,  in  a  hundred  rural  parishes,  who  make 
grace  to  abound  through  the  intimate  and  precious  min- 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

istrations  of  the  country  parson.  Let  us,  therefore,  de- 
vote this  chapter  to  a  review  of  the  several  aspects  of 
the  Christian  ministry,  in  order  to  set  in  its  just  perspec- 
tive the  one  which  we  have  chosen  for  these  discussions 
and  to  see  why  it  seems  to  stand,  for  the  moment,  in  the 
forefront  of  importance.  Our  immediate  question  is, 
Who,  on  the  whole,  is  the  most  needed  figure  in  the 
ministry  today  ?  Is  it  the  professional  ecclesiastic,  backed 
with  the  authority  and  prestige  of  a  venerable  organiza- 
tion? Is  it  the  curate  of  souls,  patient  shepherd  of  the 
silly  sheep?  Is  it  the  theologian,  the  administrator,  the 
prophet — who  ? 

One  might  think  profitably  on  that  first  question  in 
these  very  informal  days.  We  are  witnessing  a  break- 
down of  all  external  forms  of  authority  which,  while 
salutary  and  necessary,  is  also  perilous.  Not  many  of 
us  err,  just  now,  by  overmagnifying  our  official  status. 
Many  of  us  instead  are  terribly  at  ease  in  Zion  and 
might  become  less  assured  and  more  significant  by  un- 
dertaking the  subjective  task  of  a  study  in  ministerial 
personality.  "What  we  are,"  to  paraphrase  Emerson, 
"speaks  so  loud  that  men  cannot  hear  what  we  say." 
Every  great  calling  has  its  characteristic  mental  attitude, 
the  unwritten  code  of  honor  of  the  group,  without  a 
knowledge  of  which  one  could  scarcely  be  an  efficient 
or  honorable  practitioner  within  it.  One  of  the  perplex- 
ing and  irritating  problems  of  the  personal  life  of  the 
preacher  today  has  to  do  with  the  collision  between  the 
secular  standards  of  his  time,  this  traditional  code  of 
his  class,  and  the  requirements  of  his  faith.  Shall  he 
acquiesce  in  the  smug  conformities,  the  externalized 
procedures  of  average  society,  somewhat  pietized,  and 
join  that  large  company  of  good  and  ordinary  people, 

16 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

of  whom  Samuel  Butler  remarks,  in  The  Way  of  All 
Flesh,  that  they  would  be  "equally  horrified  at  hearing 
the  Christian  religion  doubted,  or  at  seeing  it  practised  ?" 
There  are  ministers  who  do  thus  content  themselves  with 
being  merely  superrespectable.  Shall  he  exalt  the  stand- 
ards of  his  calling,  accentuate  the  speech  and  dress,  the 
code  and  manners  of  his  group,  the  historic  statements 
of  his  faith,  at  the  risk  of  becoming  an  official,  a  "pro- 
fessional"? Or  does  he  possess  the  insight,  and  can  he 
acquire  the  courage,  to  follow  men  like  Francis  of  As- 
sisi  or  Father  Damien  and  adopt  the  Christian  ethic 
and  thus  join  that  company  of  the  apostles  and  martyrs 
whose  blood  is  the  seed  of  the  church?  A  good  deal 
might  be  said  today  on  the  need  of  this  sort  of  personal 
culture  in  the  ministerial  candidate.  But,  provocative 
and  significant  though  the  question  is,  it  is  too  limited 
in  scope,  too  purely  subjective  in  nature,  to  suit  the  char- 
acter and  the  urgency  of  the  needs  of  this  moment. 

Again,  every  profession  has  the  prized  inheritance  of 
its  own  particular  and  gradually  perfected  human  skill. 
An  interesting  study,  then,  would  be  the  analysis  of  that 
rich  content  of  human  insights,  the  result  of  generations 
of  pastoral  experience,  which  form  the  background  of 
all  great  preaching.  No  man,  whether  learned  or  pious, 
or  both,  is  equipped  for  the  pulpit  without  the  addition 
of  that  intuitive  discernment,  that  quick  and  varied  ap- 
preciation, that  sane  and  tolerant  knowledge  of  life  and 
the  world,  which  is  the  reward  given  to  the  friends  and 
lovers  of  mankind.  For  the  preacher  deals  not  with  the 
shallows  but  the  depths  of  life.  Like  his  Master  he 
must  be  a  great  humanist.  To  make  real  sermons  he  has 
to  look,  without  dismay  or  evasion,  far  into  the  heart's 
impenetrable  recesses.  He  must  have  had  some  experi- 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

ence  with  the  absolutism  of  both  good  and  evil.  I  think 
preachers  who  regard  sermons  on  salvation  as  super- 
fluous have  not  had  much  experience  with  either.  They 
belong  to  that  large  world  of  the  intermediates,  neither 
positively  good  nor  bad,  who  compose  the  mass  of  the 
prosperous  and  respectable  in  our  genteel  civilization. 
Since  they  belong  to  it  they  cannot  lead  it.  And  certainly 
they  who  do  not  know  the  absolutism  of  evil  cannot  very 
well  understand  sinners.  Genuine  satans,  as  Milton  knew, 
are  not  weaklings  and  traitors  who  have  declined  from 
the  standards  of  a  respectable  civilization.  They  are  posi- 
tive and  impressive  figures  pursuing  and  acting  up  to  their 
own  ideal  of  conduct,  not  fleeing  from  self-accepted  ret- 
ribution or  falling  away  from  a  confessed  morality  of 
ours.  Evil  is  a  force  even  more  than  a  folly ;  it  is  a  posi- 
tive agent  busily  building  away  at  the  City  of  Dreadful 
Night,  constructing  its  insolent  and  scoffing  society 
within  the  very  precincts  of  the  City  of  God. 

He  must  know,  then,  that  evil  and  suffering  are  not 
temporary  elements  of  man's  evolution,  just  about  to  be 
eliminated  by  the  new  reform,  the  last  formula,  the  fresh 
panacea.  To  those  who  have  tasted  grief  and  smelt  the 
fire  such  easy  preaching  and  such  confident  solutions  are 
a  grave  offense.  They  know  that  evil  is  an  integral  part 
of  our  universe;  suffering  an  enduring  element  of  the 
whole.  So  he  must  preach  upon  the  chances  and  changes 
of  this  mortal  world,  or  go  to  the  house  of  shame  or 
the  place  of  mourning,  knowing  that  there  is  something 
past  finding  out  in  evil,  something  incommunicable  about 
true  sorrow.  They  are  not  external  things,  alien  to  our 
natures,  that  happen  one  day  from  without,  and  may 
perhaps  be  avoided,  and  by  and  by  are  gone.  No;  that 
which  makes  sorrow,  sorrow,  and  evil,  evil,  is  their  nat- 

18 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

uralness ;  they  well  up  from  within,  part  of  the  very  tex- 
ture of  our  consciousness.  He  knows  you  can  never  ex- 
press them,  for  truly  to  do  that  you  would  have  to 
express  and  explain  the  entire  world.  It  is  not  easy  then 
to  interpret  the  evil  and  suffering  which  are  not  external 
and  temporary,  but  enduring  and  a  part  of  the  whole. 

So  the  preacher  is  never  dealing  with  plain  or  uncom- 
plicated matters.  It  is  his  business  to  perceive  the  mys- 
tery of  iniquity  in  the  saint  and  to  recognize  the  mystery 
of  godliness  in  the  sinner.  It  is  his  business  to  revere 
the  child  and  yet  watch  him  that  he  may  make  a  man  of 
him.  He  must  say,  so  as  to  be  understood,  to  those  who 
balk  at  discipline,  and  rail  at  self-repression,  and  resent 
pain:  you  have  not  yet  begun  to  live  nor  made  the  first 
step  toward  understanding  the  universe  and  yourselves. 
To  avoid  discipline  and  to  blench  at  pain  is  to  evade 
life.  There  are  limitations,  occasioned  by  the  evil  and 
the  suffering  of  the  world,  in  whose  repressions  men 
find  fulfillment.  When  you  are  honest  with  yourself  you 
will  know  what  Dante  meant  when  he  said: 

"  And  thou  shalt  see  those  who 
Contented  are  within  the  fire; 
Because  they  hope  to  come, 
When  e'er  it  may  be,  to  the  blessed  people."1 

It  is  his  business,  also,  to  be  the  comrade  of  his  peers, 
and  yet  speak  to  them  the  truth  in  love ;  his  task  to  un- 
derstand the  bitterness  and  assuage  the  sorrows  of  old 
age.  I  suppose  the  greatest  influence  a  preacher  ever  ex- 
ercises, and  a  chief  source  of  the  material  and  insight  of 
his  preaching,  is  found  in  this  intimate  contact  with  liv- 
ing and  suffering,  divided  and  distracted  men  and 

1  The  Divine  Comedy:  Hell;  canto  I. 

19 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

women.  When  strong  men  blench  with  pain  and  ex- 
quisite grief  stirs  within  us  at  the  sight  and  we  can  en- 
dure naught  else  but  to  suffer  with  them,  when  youth 
is  blurred  with  sin,  and  gray  heads  are  sick  with  shame 
and  we,  then,  want  to  die  and  cry,  O  God!  forgive  and 
save  them  or  else  blot  me  out  of  Thy  book  of  life — for 
who  could  bear  to  live  in  a  world  where  such  things  are 
the  end! — then,  through  the  society  of  sorrow,  and  the 
holy  comradeship  in  shame,  we  begin  to  find  the  Lord 
and  to  understand  both  the  kindness  and  the  justice  of 
His  world.  In  the  moment  when  sympathy  takes  the 
bitterness  out  of  another's  sorrow  and  my  suffering 
breaks  the  captivity  of  my  neighbor's  sin — then,  when 
because  "together,"  with  sinner  and  sufferer,  we  come 
out  into  the  quiet  land  of  freedom  and  of  peace,  we  per- 
ceive how  the  very  heart  of  God,  upon  which  there  we 
know  we  rest,  may  be  found  in  the  vicarious  suffering 
and  sacrifice  called  forth  by  the  sorrow  and  the  evil  of 
mankind.  Then  we  can  preach  the  Gospel.  Because  then 
we  dimly  understand  why  men  have  hung  their  God  upon 
the  Cross  of  Christ! 

Is  it  not  ludicrous,  then,  to  suppose  that  a  man  merely 
equipped  with  professional  scholarship,  or  contented 
with  moral  conformities,  can  minister  to  the  sorrow  and 
the  mystery,  the  mingled  shame  and  glory  of  a  human 
being?  This  is  why  the  average  theologue,  in  his  first 
parish,  is  like  the  well-meaning  but  meddling  engineer 
endeavoring  with  clumsy  tools  and  insensitive  fingers  to 
adjust  the  delicate  and  complicated  mechanism  of  a  Ge- 
nevan watch.  And  here  is  one  of  the  real  reasons  why  we 
deprecate  men  entering  our  calling,  without  both  the  cul- 
ture of  a  liberal  education  and  the  learning  of  a  graduate 
school.  Clearly,  therefore,  one  real  task  of  such  schools 

20 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

and  their  lectureships  is  to  offer  men  wide  and  gracious 
training  in  the  art  of  human  contacts,  so  that  their  lives 
may  be  lifted  above  Pharisaism  and  moral  self -con- 
sciousness, made  acquainted  with  the  higher  and  compre- 
hensive interpretations  of  the  heart  and  mind  of  our 
race.  For  only  thus  can  they  approach  life  reverently 
and  humbly.  Only  thus  will  they  revere  the  integrity  of 
the  human  spirit;  only  thus  can  they  regard  it  with  a 
magnanimous  and  catholic  understanding  and  measure 
it  not  by  the  standards  of  temperamental  or  sectarian 
convictions,  but  by  what  is  best  and  highest,  deepest  and 
holiest  in  the  race.  No  one  needs  more  than  the  young 
preacher  to  be  drawn  out  of  the  range  of  narrow  judg- 
ments, of  exclusive  standards  and  ecclesiastical  traditions 
and  to  be  flung  out  among  free  and  sensitive  spirits,  that 
he  may  watch  their  workings,  master  their  perceptions, 
catch  their  scale  of  values. 

A  discussion,  then,  dealing  with  this  aspect  of  our 
problem,  would  raise  many  and  genuine  questions  for 
us.  There  is  the  more  room  for  it  in  this  time  of  increas- 
ing emphasis  upon  machinery  when  even  ministers  are 
being  measured  in  the  terms  of  power,  speed  and  utility. 
These  are  not  real  ends  of  life;  real  ends  are  unity,  re- 
pose, the  imaginative  and  spiritual  values  which  make 
for  the  release  of  self,  with  its  by-product  of  happiness. 
In  such  days,  then,  when  the  old-time  pastor-preacher 
is-  becoming  as  rare  as  the  former  general  practitioner ; 
when  the  lines  of  division  between  speaker,  educator, 
expert  in  social  hygiene,  are  being  sharply  drawn — as 
though  new  methods  insured  of  themselves  fresh  inspi- 
ration, and  technical  knowledge  was  identical  with  spirit- 
ual understanding — it  would  be  worth  while  to  dwell  upon 
the  culture  of  the  pastoral  office  and  to  show  that  inge- 

21 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

nuity  is  not  yet  synonymous  with  insight,  and  that,  in  our 
profession  at  least,  card-catalogues  cannot  take  the  place 
of  the  personal  study  of  the  human  heart.  But  many 
discussions  on  this  Foundation,  and  recently  those  of 
Dr.  Jowett,  have  already  dealt  with  this  sort  of  analysis. 
Besides,  today,  when  not  merely  the  preacher,  but  the 
very  view  of  the  world  that  produced  him,  is  being 
threatened  with  temporary  extinction,  such  a  theme, 
poetic  and  rewarding  though  it  is,  becomes  irrelevant 
and  parochial. 

Or  we  might  turn  to  the  problem  of  technique,  that 
professional  equipment  for  his  task  as  a  sermonizer  and 
public  speaker  which  is  partly  a  native  endowment  and 
partly  a  laborious  acquisition  on  the  preacher's  part. 
Such  was  President  Tucker's  course  on  The  Making  and 
Unmaking  of  the  Preacher.  Certainly  observations  on 
professional  technique,  especially  if  they  should  include, 
like  his,  acute  discussion  of  the  speaker's  obligation  to 
honesty  of  thinking,  no  less  than  integrity  of  conduct; 
of  the  immorality  of  the  pragmatic  standard  of  mere 
effectiveness  or  immediate  efficiency  in  the  selection  of 
material;  of  the  aesthetic  folly  and  ethical  dubiety  of 
simulated  extempore  speaking  and  genuinely  impromptu 
prayers,  would  not  be  superfluous.  But,  on  the  other  hand, 
we  may  hope  to  accomplish  much  of  this  indirectly  today. 
Because  there  is  no  way  of  handling  specifically  either 
the  content  of  the  Christian  message  or  the  problem  of 
the  immediate  needs  and  temper  of  those  to  whom  it  is 
to  be  addressed,  without  reference  to  the  kind  of  per- 
sonality, and  the  nature  of  the  tools  at  his  disposal,  which 
is  best  suited  to  commend  the  one  and  to  interpret  the 
other. 

Hence  such  a  discussion  as  this  ought,  by  its  very  scale 

22 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

of  values — by  the  motives  that  inform  it  and  the  ends 
that  determine  it — to  condemn  thereby  the  insincere  and 
artificial  speaker,  or  that  pseudo-sermon  which  is  neither 
as  exposition,  an  argument  nor  a  meditation  but  a  mosaic, 
a  compilation  of  other  men's  thoughts,  eked  out  by  im- 
possibly impressive  or  piously  sentimental  anecdotes,  the 
whole  glued  together  by  platitudes  of  the  Martin  Tupper 
or  Samuel  Smiles  variety.  It  is  certainly  an  obvious  but 
greatly  neglected  truth  that  simplicity  and  candor  in  pub- 
lic speaking,  largeness  of  mental  movement,  what  Phil- 
lips Brooks  called  direct  utterance  of  comprehensive 
truths,  are  indispensable  prerequisites  for  any  significant 
ethical  or  spiritual  leadership.  But,  taken  as  a  main 
theme,  this  third  topic,  like  the  others,  seems  to  me  in- 
sufficiently inclusive  to  meet  our  present  exigencies.  It 
deals  more  with  the  externals  than  with  the  heart  of  our 
subject. 

Again  we  might  address  ourselves  to  the  ethical  and 
practical  aspects  of  preaching  and  the  ministry.  Taking 
largely  for  granted  our  understanding  of  the  Gospel,  we 
might  concern  ourselves  with  its  relations  to  society,  the 
detailed  implications  for  the  moral  and  economic  prob- 
lems of  our  social  and  industrial  order.  Dean  Brown, 
in  The  Social  Message  of  the  Modern  Pulpit,  and  Dr. 
Coffin  in  In  a  Day  of  Social  Rebuilding,  have  so  enriched 
this  Foundation.  Moreover,  this  is,  at  the  moment,  an 
almost  universally  popular  treatment  of  the  preacher's 
opportunity  and  obligation.  One  reason,  therefore,  for 
not  choosing  this  approach  to  our  task  is  that  the 
preacher's  attention,  partly  because  of  the  excellence  of 
these  and  other  books  and  lectures,  and  partly  because 
of  the  acuteness  of  the  political-industrial  crisis  which  is 
now  upon  us,  is  already  focused  upon  it. 

23 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

Besides,  our  present  moment  is  changing  with  an  omi- 
nous rapidity.  And  one  is  not  sure  whether  the  immediate 
situation,  as  distinguished  from  that  of  even  a  few  years 
ago,  calls  us  to  be  concerned  chiefly  with  the  practical  and 
ethical  aspects  of  our  mission,  urgent  though  the  need 
and  critical  the  pass,  to  which  the  abuses  of  the  capital- 
istic system  have  brought  both  European  and  American 
society.  In  this  day  of  those  shifting  standards  which 
mark  the  gradual  transference  of  power  from  one  group 
to  another  in  the  community,  and  the  merging  of  a  spent 
epoch  in  a  new  order,  neither  the  chief  opportunity  nor 
the  most  serious  peril  of  religious  leadership  is  met  by 
fresh  and  energetic  programs  of  religion  in  action.  In 
such  days,  our  chief  gift  to  the  world  cannot  be  the  sup- 
port of  any  particular  reforms  or  the  alliance  with  any 
immediate  ethical  or  economic  movement.  For  these 
things  at  best  would  be  merely  the  effects  of  religion.  And 
it  is  not  religion  in  its  relations,  nor  even  in  its  expression 
in  character — it  is  the  thing  in  itself  that  this  age  most 
needs.  What  men  are  chiefly  asking  of  life  at  this  mo- 
ment is  not,  What  ought  we  to  do?  but  the  deeper  ques- 
tion, What  is  there  we  can  believe?  For  they  know  that 
the  answer  to  this  question  would  show  us  what  we  ought 
to  do. 

Nor  do  our  reform  alliances  and  successive  programs 
and  crusades  always  seem  to  me  to  proceed  from  any 
careful  estimate  of  the  situation  as  a  whole  or  to  be  con- 
ceived in  the  light  of  comprehensive  Christian  principle. 
Instead,  they  sometimes  seem  to  draw  their  inspiration 
more  from  the  sense  of  the  urgent  need  of  presenting 
to  an  indifferent  or  disillusioned  world  some  quick  and 
tangible  evidence  of  a  continuing  moral  vigor  and  spirit- 
ual passion  to  which  the  deeper  and  more  potent  wit- 

24 


nesses  are  absent.  It  is  as  though  we  thought  the  ma- 
chinery of  the  church  would  revolve  with  more  energy 
if  geared  into  the  wheels  of  the  working  world.  But  that 
world  and  we  do  not  draw  our  power  from  the  same 
dynamo.  And  surely  in  a  day  of  profound  and  wide- 
spread mental  ferment  and  moral  restlessness,  some  more 
fundamental  gift  than  this  is  asked  of  us. 

If,  therefore,  these  chapters  pay  only  an  incidental  at- 
tention to  the  church's  social  and  ethical  message,  it  is 
partly  because  our  attention  is,  at  this  very  moment, 
largely  centered  upon  this  important,  yet  secondary  mat- 
ter, and  more  because  there  lies  beneath  it  a  yet  more 
urgent  and  inclusive  task  which  confronts  the  spokesman 
of  organized  religion. 

You  will  expect  me  then  to  say  that  we  are  to  turn  to 
some  speculative  and  philosophic  study,  such  as  the 
analysis  of  the  Christian  idea  in  its  world  relationships, 
some  fresh  statement  of  the  Gospel,  either  by  way  of  apo- 
logia for  inherited  concepts,  or  as  attempting  to  make  a 
new  receptacle  for  the  living  wine,  which  has  indeed 
burst  the  most  of  its  ancient  bottles.  Such  was  Principal 
Fairbairn's  monumental  task  in  The  Place  of  Christ  in 
Modern  Theology  and  also  Dr.  Gordon's  in  his  distin- 
guished discussions  in  The  Ultimate  Conceptions  of  Faith. 

Here,  certainly,  is  an  endeavor  which  is  always  of  pri- 
mary importance.  There  is  an  abiding  peril,  forever 
•crouching  at  the  door  of  ancient  organizations,  that  they 
shall  seek  refuge  from  the  difficulties  of  thought  in  the 
opportunities  of  action.  They  need  to  be  continually  re- 
minded that  reforms  begin  in  the  same  place  where 
abuses  do,  namely,  in  the  notion  of  things ;  that  only  just 
ideas  can,  in  the  long  run,  purify  conduct ;  that  clear 
thinking  is  the  source  of  all  high  and  sustained  feeling. 

25 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

I  wish  that  we  might  essay  the  philosopher-theologian's 
task.  This  generation  is  hungry  for  understanding;  it 
perishes  for  lack  of  knowledge.  One  reason  for  the  in- 
dubitable decline  of  the  preacher's  power  is  that  we  have 
been  culpably  indifferent  in  maintaining  close  and 
friendly  alliances  between  the  science  and  the  art,  the 
teachers  and  the  practitioners  of  religion.  Few  things 
would  be  more  ominous  than  to  permit  any  further 
widening  of  the  gulf  which  already  exists  between  these 
two.  Never  more  than  now  does  the  preacher  need  to 
be  reminded  of  what  Marcus  Aurelius  said :  "Such  as 
are  thy  habitual  thoughts,  such  also  shall  be  thyself ;  for 
the  soul  is  dyed  by  its  thoughts." 

But  such  an  undertaking,  calling  for  wide  and  exact 
scholarship,  large  reserves  of  extra-professional  learn- 
ing, does  not  primarily  belong  to  a  discussion  within  the 
department  of  practical  theology.  Besides  which  there 
is  a  task,  closely  allied  to  it,  but  creative  rather  than  crit- 
ical, prophetic  rather  than  philosophic,  which  does  fall 
within  the  precise  area  of  this  field.  I  mean  the  endeavor 
to  describe  the  mind  and  heart  of  our  generation,  ap- 
praise the  significant  thought-currents  of  our  time.  This 
would  be  an  attempt  to  give  some  description  of  the  chief 
impulses  fermenting  in  contemporary  society,  to  ask 
what  relation  they  hold  to  the  Christian  principle,  and 
to  inquire  what  attitude  toward  them  our  preaching 
should  adopt.  If  it  be  true  that  what  is  most  revealing 
in  any  age  is  its  regulative  ideas,  then  what  is  more  valu- 
able for  the  preacher  than  to  attempt  the  understand- 
ing of  his  generation  through  the  defining  of  its  ruling 
concepts?  And  it  is  this  audacious  task  which,  for  two 
reasons,  we  shall  presume  to  undertake. 

The  first  reason  is  that  it  is  appropriate  both  to  the 

26 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

temperament  and  the  training  of  the  preacher.  There  are 
three  grand  divisions,  or  rather  determining  emphases, 
by  which  men  may  be  separated  into  vocational  groups. 
To  begin  with,  there  is  the  man  of  the  scientific  or  in- 
tellectual type.  He  has  a  passion  for  facts  and  a 
strong  sense  of  their  reality.  He  moves  with  natural  ease 
among  abstract  propositions,  is  both  critical  of,  and  fer- 
tile in,  theories;  indicates  his  essential  distinction  in  his 
love  of  the  truth  for  the  truth's  sake.  He  looks  first  to 
the  intrinsic  reasonableness  of  any  proposition;  tends  to 
judge  both  men  and  movements  not  by  traditional  or 
personal  values,  but  by  a  detached  and  disinterested  ap- 
praisal of  their  inherent  worth.  He  is  often  a  dogmatist, 
but  this  fault  is  not  peculiar  to  him,  he  shares  it  with  the 
rest  of  mankind.  He  is  sometimes  a  literalist  and  some- 
times a  slave  to  logic,  more  concerned  with  combating  the 
crude  or  untenable  form  of  a  proposition  than  inquiring 
with  sympathetic  insight  into  the  worth  of  its  substance. 
But  these  things  are  perversions  of  his  excellencies,  de- 
fects of  his  virtues.  His  characteristic  qualities  are  men- 
tal integrity,  accuracy  of  statement,  sanity  of  judgment, 
capacity  for  sustained  intellectual  toil.  Such  men  are  in- 
vestigators, scholars;  when  properly  blended  with  the 
imaginative  type  they  become  inventors  and  teachers. 
They  make  good  theologians  and  bad  preachers. 

Then  there  are  the  practical  men,  beloved  of  our 
American  life.  Both  their  feet  are  firmly  fixed  upon  the 
solid  ground.  They  generally  know  just  where  they  are, 
which  is  not  surprising,  for  they  do  not,  for  the  most 
part,  either  in  the  world  of  mind  or  spirit,  frequent  un- 
usual places.  The  finespun  speculations  of  the  philoso- 
phers and  the  impractical  dreams  of  the  artist  make 
small  appeal  to  them ;  the  world  they  live  in  is  a  sharply 

27 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

defined  and  clearly  lighted  and  rather  limited  place.  They 
like  to  say  to  this  man  come  and  he  cometh,  and  to  that 
man  go  and  he  goeth.  They  are  enamored  of  offices, 
typewriters,  telegrams,  long-distance  messages,  secre- 
taries, programs,  conferences  and  drives.  Getting  results 
is  their  goal ;  everything  is  judged  by  the  criterion  of 
effective  action;  they  are  instinctive  and  unconscious 
pragmatists.  They  make  good  cheer  leaders  at  football 
games  in  their  youth  and  impressive  captains  of  industry 
in  their  old  age.  Their  virtues  are  wholesome,  if  obvious ; 
they  are  good  mixers,  have  shrewd  judgment,  immense 
physical  and  volitional  energy.  They  understand  that  two 
and  two  make  four.  They  are  rarely  saints  but,  unlike 
many  of  us  who  once  had  the  capacity  for  sainthood, 
they  are  not  dreadful  sinners.  They  are  the  tribe  of  which 
politicians  are  born  but,  when  they  are  blended  with 
imaginative  and  spiritual  gifts,  they  become  philan- 
thropists and  statesmen,  practical  servants  of  mankind. 
They  make  good,  if  conservative,  citizens ;  kind,  if  unin- 
spiring, husbands  and  deplorable  preachers. 

Then  there  are  those  fascinating  men  of  feeling  and 
imagination,  those  who  look  into  their  own  hearts  and 
write,  those  to  whom  the  inner  dominions  which  the 
spirit  conquers  for  itself  become  a  thousand-fold  more 
real  than  the  earth  whereon  they  stamp  their  feet.  These 
are  the  literary  or  the  creative  folk.  Their  passion  is  not 
so  much  to  know  life  as  to  enjoy  it ;  not  to  direct  it,  but 
to  experience  it;  not  even  to  make  understanding  of  it 
an  end,  but  only  a  means  to  interpreting  it.  They  do  not, 
as  a  rule,  thirst  for  erudition,  and  they  are  indifferent  to 
those  manipulations  of  the  externals  of  life  which  are 
dear  to  the  lovers  of  executive  power.  They  know  less 
but  they  understand  more  than  their  scholastic  brethren. 

28 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

As  a  class  they  are  sometimes  disreputable  but  nearly 
always  unworldly;  more  distinguished  by  an  intuitive 
and  childlike  than  by  an  ingenious  or  sophisticated  qual- 
ity of  mind.  Ideas  and  facts  are  perceived  by  them  not 
abstractly  nor  practically,  but  in  their  typical  or  symbolic, 
hence  their  pictorial  and  transmissible,  aspects.  They  read 
dogma,  whether  theological  or  other,  in  the  terms  of  a 
living  process,  unconsciously  translating  it,  as  they  go 
along,  out  of  its  cold  propositions  into  its  appropriate 
forms  of  feeling  and  needs  and  satisfactions. 

The  scientist,  then,  is  a  critic,  a  learner  who  wants  to 
analyze  and  dissect ;  the  man  of  affairs  is  a  director  and 
builder  and  wants  to  command  and  construct;  the  man 
of  this  group  is  a  seer.  He  is  a  lover  and  a  dreamer; 
he  watches  and  broods  over  life,  profoundly  feeling  it, 
enamored  both  of  its  shame  and  of  its  glory.  The  in- 
tolerable poignancy  of  existence  is  bittersweet  to  his 
mouth ;  he  craves  to  incarnate,  to  interpret  its  entire  hu- 
man process,  always  striving  to  pierce  to  its  center,  to 
capture  and  express  its  inexpressible  ultimate.  He  is  an 
egotist  but  a  valuable  one,  acutely  aware  of  the  depths 
and  immensities  of  his  own  spirit  and  of  its  significant 
relations  to  this  seething  world  without.  Thus  it  is  both 
himself  and  a  new  vision  of  life,  in  terms  of  himself, 
that  he  desires  to  project  for  his  community. 

The  form  of  that  vision  will  vary  according  to  the  na- 
ture of  the  tools,  the  selection  of  material,  the  particular 
sort  of  native  endowment  which  are  given  to  him.  Some 
such  men  reveal  their  understanding  of  the  soul  and  the 
world  in  the  detached  serenity,  the  too  well-defined  har- 
monies of  a  Parthenon;  others  in  the  dim  and  intricate 
richness,  the  confused  and  tortured  aspiration  of  the  long- 
limbed  saints  and  grotesque  devils  of  a  Gothic  cathedral. 

29 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

Others  incarnate  it  in  gleaming  bronze;  or  spread  it  in 
subtle  play  of  light  and  shade  and  tones  of  color  on  a 
canvas;  or  write  it  in  great  plays  which  open  the  dark 
chambers  of  the  soul  and  make  the  heart  stand  still;  or 
sing  it  in  sweet  and  terrible  verse,  full-throated  utterance 
of  man's  pride  and  hope  and  passion.  Some  act  it  before 
the  altar  or  beneath  the  proscenium  arch ;  some  speak  it, 
now  in  Cassandra-tones,  now  comfortably  like  shepherds 
of  frail  sheep.  These  folk  are  the  brothers-in-blood,  the 
fellow  craftsmen  of  the  preacher.  By  a  silly  convention, 
he  is  almost  forbidden  to  consult  with  them,  and  to  be- 
take himself  to  the  learned,  the  respectable  and  the  dull. 
But  it  is  with  these  that  naturally  he  sees  eye  to  eye. 

In  short,  in  calling  the  preacher  a  prophet  we  mean 
that  preaching  is  an  art  and  the  preacher  is  an  artist; 
for  all  great  art  has  the  prophetic  quality.  Many  men 
object  to  this  definition  of  the  preacher  as  being  profane. 
It  appears  to  make  secular  or  mechanicalize  their  pro- 
fession, to  rob  preaching  of  its  sacrosanctity,  leave  it 
less  authority  by  making  it  more  intelligible,  remove  it 
from  the  realm  of  the  mystical  and  unique.  This  objec- 
tion seems  to  me  sometimes  an  expression  of  spiritual 
arrogance  and  sometimes  a  subtle  form  of  skepticism.  It 
assumes  a  special  privilege  for  our  profession  or  a  not- 
get-at-able  defense  and  sanction  by  insisting  that  it  dif- 
fers in  origin  and  hence  in  kind  from  similar  expressions 
of  the  human  spirit.  It  hesitates  to  rely  on  the  normal 
and  the  intelligible  sources  of  ministerial  power,  to  con- 
fess the  relatively  definable  origin  and  understandable 
methods  of  our  work.  It  fears  to  trust  to  these  alone. 

But  all  these  must  be  trusted.  We  may  safely  assert 
that  the  preacher  deals  with  absolute  values,  for  all  art 
does  that.  But  we  may  not  assert  that  he  is  the  only  per- 

30 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

son  that  does  so  or  that  his  is  the  only  or  the  unapproach- 
able way.  No;  he,  too,  is  an  artist.  Hence,  a  sermon  is 
not  a  contribution  to,  but  an  interpretation  of,  knowledge, 
made  in  terms  of  the  religious  experience.  It  is  taking 
truth  out  of  its  compressed  and  abstract  form,  its  im- 
personal and  scientific  language,  and  returning  it  to  life 
in  the  terms  of  the  ethical  and  spiritual  experience  of 
mankind,  thus  giving  it  such  concrete  and  pictorial  ex- 
pression that  it  stimulates  the  imagination  and  moves  the 
will. 

It  will  be  clear  then  why  I  have  said  that  the  task  of 
appraising  the  heart  and  mind  of  our  generation,  to 
which  we  address  ourselves,  is  appropriate  to  the  preach- 
ing genius.  For  only  they  could  attempt  such  a  task  who 
possess  an  informed  and  disciplined  yet  essentially  intui- 
tive spirit  with  its  scale  of  values;  who  by  instinct  can 
see  their  age  as  a  whole  and  indicate  its  chief  emphases, 
its  controlling  tendencies,  its  significant  expressions.  It 
is  not  the  scientist  but  the  seer  who  thus  attempts  the 
precious  but  perilous  task  of  making  the  great  general- 
izations. This  is  what  Aristotle  means  when  he  says, 
"The  poet  ranks  higher  than  the  historian  because  he 
achieves  a  more  general  truth."  This  is,  I  suppose,  what 
Houston  Stewart  Chamberlain  means  when  he  says,  in 
the  introduction  to  the  Foundations  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century:  "our  modern  world  represents  an  immeasura- 
ble array  of  facts.  The  mastery  of  such  a  task  as  record- 
ing and  interpreting  them  scientifically  is  impossible.  It 
is  only  the  genius  of  the  artist,  which  feels  the  secret 
parallels  that  exist  between  the  world  of  vision  and  of 
thought,  that  can,  if  fortune  be  favorable,  reveal  the 
unity  beneath  the  immeasurable  complexities  and  diver- 
sities of  the  present  order."  Or  as  Professor  Hocking 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

says:  "The  prophet  must  find  in  the  current  of  history 
a  unity  corresponding  to  the  unity  of  the  physical  uni- 
verse, or  else  he  must  create  it.  It  is  this  conscious  uni- 
fication of  history  that  the  religious  will  spontaneously 
tends  to  bring  about."1 

It  is  then  precisely  the  preacher's  task,  his  peculiar 
office,  to  attempt  these  vast  and  perilous  summations. 
What  he  is  set  here  for  is  to  bring  the  immeasurable 
within  the  scope  of  vision.  He  deals  with  the  far-flung 
outposts,  no  man  knows  how  distant,  and  the  boundless 
interspaces  of  human  consciousness;  he  deals  with  the 
beginning,  the  middle,  the  end — the  origin,  the  meaning 
and  the  destiny — of  human  life.  How  can  anyone  give 
unity  to  such  a  prospect?  Like  any  other  artist  he  gives 
it  the  only  unity  possible,  the  unity  revealed  in  his  own 
personality.  The  theologian  should  not  attempt  to  evalu- 
ate his  age;  the  preacher  may.  Because  the  theologian, 
like  any  other  scientist,  analyzes  and  dissects;  he  breaks 
up  the  world.  The  preacher  in  his  disciplined  imagina- 
tion, his  spiritual  intuitiveness, — what  we  call  the  "reli- 
gious temperament," — unites  it  again  and  makes  men  see 
it  whole.  This  quality  of  purified  and  enlightened  imagi- 
nation is  of  the  very  essence  of  the  preacher's  power 
and  art.  Hence  he  may  attempt  to  set  forth  a  just  under- 
standing of  his  generation. 

This  brings  us  to  the  second  reason  for  our  topic, 
namely,  its  timeliness.  All  religious  values  are  not  at  all 
times  equal  in  importance.  As  generations  come  and  go, 
first  one,  then  another  looms  in  the  foreground.  But  I 
sincerely  believe  that  the  most  fateful  undertaking  for 
the  preacher  at  this  moment  is  that  of  analyzing  his  own 
generation.  Because  he  has  been  flung  into  one  of  the 

1  The  Meaning  of  God  in  Human  Experience,  p.  518. 

32 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

world's  transition  epochs,  he  speaks  in  an  hour  which 
is  radical  in  changes,  perplexing  in  its  multifarious  cross- 
currents, prolific  of  new  forms  and  expressions.  What 
the  world  most  needs  at  such  a  moment  of  expansion  and 
rebellion,  is  a  redefining  of  its  ideals.  It  needs  to  have 
some  eternal  scale  of  values  set  before  it  once  more.  It 
needs  to  stop  long  enough  to  find  out  just  what  and 
where  it  is,  and  toward  what  it  is  going.  It  needs  another 
Sheridan  to  write  a  new  School  for  Scandal,  another 
Swift,  with  his  Gulliver's  Travels,  a  continuing  Shaw 
with  his  satiric  comedies,  a  Mrs.  Wharton  with  her 
House  of  Mirth,  a  Thorstein  Veblen  with  his  Higher 
Learning  in  America,  a  Savonarola  with  his  call  to  re- 
pentance and  indictment  of  worldly  and  unfaithful  liv- 
ing. It  is  a  difficult  and  dangerous  office,  this  of  the 
prophet;  it  calls  for  a  considerate  and  honest  mind  as 
well  as  a  flashing  insight  and  an  eager  heart.  The  false 
prophet  exposes  that  he  may  exploit  his  age;  the  true 
prophet  portrays  that  he  may  purge  it.  Like  Jeremiah 
we  may  well  dread  to  undertake  the  task,  yet  its  day 
and  hour  are  upon  us ! 

I  have  already  spoken  to  this  point  at  length,  in  a 
little  book  recently  published.  I  merely  add  here 
that  in  a  day  of  obvious  political  disillusionment  and  in- 
dustrial revolt,  of  intellectual  rebellion  against  an  out- 
worn order  of  ideas  and  of  moral  restlessness  and  doubt, 
an. indispensable  duty  for  the  preacher  is  this  compre- 
hensive study  and  understanding  of  his  own  epoch.  Else, 
without  realizing  it, — and  how  true  this  often  is, — he 
proclaims  a  universal  truth  in  the  unintelligible  language 
of  a  forgotten  order,  and  applies  a  timeless  experience 
to  the  faded  conditions  of  yesterday. 

Indeed,    I   am   convinced   that    a   chief    reason    why 

33 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

preaching  is  temporarily  obscured  in  power,  is  because 
most  of  our  expertness  in  it  is  in  terms  of  local  prob- 
lems, of  partial  significances,  rather  than  in  the  wider 
tendencies  that  produce  and  carry  them,  or  in  the  ulti- 
mate laws  of  conduct  which  should  govern  them.  We 
ought  to  be  troubled,  I  think,  in  our  present  ecclesiasti- 
cal situation,  with  its  taint  of  an  almost  frantic  immedi- 
acy. Not  only  are  we  not  sufficiently  dealing  with  the 
Gospel  as  a  universal  code,  but,  as  both  cause  and  effect 
of  this,  we  are  not  applying  it  to  the  inclusive  life  of  our 
generation.  We  are  tinkering  here  and  patching  there, 
but  attempting  no  grand  evaluation.  We  have  already 
granted  that  sweeping  generalizations,  inclusive  esti- 
mates, are  as  difficult  as  they  are  audacious.  Yet  we  have 
also  seen  that  these  grand  evaluations  are  of  the  very 
essence  of  religion  and  hence  are  characteristic  of  the 
preacher's  task.  And,  finally,  it  appears  that  ours  is  an 
age  which  calls  for  such  redefining  of  its  values,  some 
fresh  and  inclusive  moral  and  religious  estimates.  Hence 
we  undertake  the  task. 

There  remains  but  one  thing  more  to  be  accomplished 
in  this  chapter.  The  problem  of  the  selection  and  ar- 
rangement of  the  material  for  such  a  summary  is  not  an 
easy  one.  Out  of  several  possible  devices  I  have  taken 
as  the  framework  on  which  to  hang  these  discussions 
three  familiar  divisions  of  thought  and  feeling,  with 
their  accompanying  laws  of  conduct,  and  value  judg- 
ments. They  are  the  humanistic  or  classic ;  the  naturalis- 
tic or  primitive;  and  the  religious  or  transcendent  inter- 
pretation of  the  world  and  life.  One  sets  up  a  social, 
one  an  individual,  and  one  a  universal  standard.  Under 
the  movements  which  these  headings  represent  we  can 
most  easily  and  clearly  order  and  appraise  the  chief  in- 

34 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

fluences  of  the  Protestant  centuries.  The  first  two  are 
largely  preempting  between  them,  at  this  moment,  the 
field  of  human  thought  and  conduct  and  a  brief  analysis 
of  them,  contrasting  their  general  attitudes,  may  serve 
as  a  fit  introduction  to  the  ensuing  chapter. 

We  begin,  then,  with  the  humanist.  He  is  the  man  who 
ignores,  as  unnecessary,  any  direct  reference  to,  or  con- 
nection with,  ultimate  or  supernatural  values.  He  lives  in 
a  high  but  self-contained  world.  His  is  man's  universe. 
His  law  is  the  law  of  reasonable  self-discipline,  founded 
on  observation  of  nature  and  a  respect  for  social  values, 
and  buttressed  by  high  human  pride.  He  accepts  the 
authority  of  the  collective  experience  of  his  generation  or 
his  race.  He  believes,  centrally,  in  the  trustworthiness  of 
human  nature,  in  its  group  capacity.  Men,  as  a  race,  have 
intelligently  observed  and  experimented  with  both  them- 
selves and  the  world  about  them.  Out  of  centuries  of 
critical  reflection  and  sad  and  wise  endeavor,  they  have 
evolved  certain  criteria  of  experience.  These  summations 
could  hardly  be  called  eternal  laws  but  they  are 
standards ;  they  are  the  permits  and  prohibitions  for  hu- 
man life.  Some  of  them  affect  personal  conduct  and  are 
moral  standards ;  some  of  them  affect  civil  government 
and  are  political  axioms ;  some  of  them  affect  production 
and  distribution  and  are  economic  laws;  some  of  them 
affect  social  relationships.  But  in  every  case  the  human- 
ist has  what  is,  in  a  sense,  an  objective  because  a  formal 
standard;  he  looks  without  himself  as  an  individual,  yet 
to  himself  as  a  part  of  the  composite  experience  and 
wisdom  of  his  race,  for  understanding  and  for  guides. 
Thus  the  individual  conforms  to  the  needs  and  wisdom 
of  the  group.  Humanism,  at  its  best,  has  something 
heroic,  unselfish,  noble  about  it.  Its  votaries  do  not  eat 

35 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

to  their  liking  nor  drink  to  their  thirst.  They  learn  deep 
lessons  almost  unconsciously;  to  conquer  their  desires, 
to  make  light  of  toil  and  pain  and  discomfort;  the  true 
humanist  is  well  aware  that  Spartan  discipline  is  incom- 
parably superior  to  Greek  accidence.  This  is  what  one  of 
the  greatest  of  them,  Goethe,  meant  when  he  said :  "Any- 
thing which  emancipates  the  spirit  without  a  correspond- 
ing growth  in  self-mastery  is  pernicious." 

All  humanists  then  have  two  characteristics  in  com- 
mon :  first,  they  assume  that  man  is  his  own  arbiter, 
has  both  the  requisite  intelligence  and  the  moral  ability 
to  control  his  own  destiny;  secondly,  they  place  the 
source  and  criterion  of  this  power  in  collective  wisdom, 
not  in  individual  vagary  and  not  in  divine  revelation. 
They  assert,  therefore,  that  the  law  of  the  group,  the  per- 
fected and  wrought  out  code  of  human  experience,  is  all 
that  is  binding  and  all  that  is  essential.  To  be  sure,  and 
most  significantly,  this  authority  is  not  rigid,  complete, 
fixed.  There  is  nothing  complete  in  the  humanist's  world. 
Experience  accumulates  and  man's  knowledge  grows; 
the  expectation  and  joy  in  progress  is  a  part  of  it ;  man's 
code  changes,  emends,  expands  with  his  onward  march- 
ing. But  the  humanistic  point  of  view  assumes  something 
relatively  stable  in  life.  Hence  our  phrase  that  humanism 
gives  us  a  classic,  that  is  to  say,  a  simple  and  established 
standard. 

It  is  to  be  observed  that  there  is  nothing  in  humanism 
thus  defined  which  need  be  incompatible  with  religion. 
It  is  not  with  its  content  but  its  incompleteness  that  we 
quarrel.  Indeed,  in  its  assertion  of  the  trustworthiness 
of  human  experience,  its  faith  in  the  dignity  and  signifi- 
cance of  man,  its  respect  for  the  interests  of  the  group, 
and  its  conviction  that  man  finds  his  true  self  only  out- 

36 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

side  his  immediate  physical  person,  beyond  his  material 
wants  and  desires,  it  is  quite  genuinely  a  part  of  the  re- 
ligious understanding.  But  we  shall  have  occasion  to  ob- 
serve that  while  much  of  this  may  be  religious  this  is  not 
the  whole  of  religion.  For  the  note  of  universality  is 
absent.  Humanism  is  essentially  aristocratic.  It  is  for  a 
selected  group  that  it  is  practicable  and  it  is  a  selected 
experience  upon  which  it  rests.  Its  standards  are  eso- 
teric rather  than  democratic.  Yet  it  is  hardly  necessary 
to  point  out  the  immense  part  which  humanism,  as  thus 
defined,  is  playing  in  present  life. 

But  there  is  another  law  which,  from  remotest  times, 
man  has  followed  whenever  he  dared.  It  is  not  the  law 
of  the  group  but  of  the  individual,  not  the  law  of  civili- 
zation but  of  the  jungle.  "Most  men,"  says  Aristotle, 
"would  rather  live  in  a  disorderly  than  a  sober  manner." 
He  means  that  most  men  would  rather  consult  and  grat- 
ify their  immediate  will,  their  nearest  choices,  their  in- 
stantaneous desires,  than  conform  the  moment  to  some 
regulated  and  considerate,  some  comprehensive  scheme 
of  life  and  action.  The  life  of  unreason  is  their  desire; 
the  experience  whose  bent  is  determined  by  every  whim, 
the  expression  which  has  no  rational  connection  with 
the  past  and  no  serious  consideration  for  the  future. 
This  is  of  the  very  essence  of  lawlessness  because  it  is 
revolt  against  the  normal  sequence  of  law  and  effect,  in 
mind  and  conduct,  in  favor  of  untrammeled  adventure. 

Now  this  is  naturalism  or  paganism  as  we  often  call 
it.  Naturalism  is  a  perversion  of  that  high  instinct  in 
mankind  which  issues  in  the  old  concept  of  supernat- 
uralism.  The  supernaturalist,  of  a  former  and  discredited 
type,  believed  that  God  violates  the  order  of  nature  for 
sublime  ends;  that  He  "breaks  into"  His  own  world,  so 

37 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

to  speak,  "revealing"  Himself  in  prodigious,  inexplicable, 
arbitrary  ways.  By  a  sort  of  degradation  of  this  notion, 
a  perversion  of  this  instinct,  the  naturalist  assumes  that 
he  can  violate  both  the  human  and  the  divine  law  for 
personal  ends,  and  express  himself  in  fantastic  or  in- 
decent or  impious  ways.  The  older  supernaturalism  exalts 
the  individualism  of  the  Creator;  naturalism  the  egotism 
of  the  creature.  I  make  the  contrast  not  merely  to  exco- 
riate naturalism,  but  to  point  out  the  interdependence  be- 
tween man's  apparently  far-separated  expressions  of 
his  spirit,  and  how  subtly  misleading  are  our  highly 
prized  distinctions,  how  dangerous  sometimes  that  sec- 
ondary mental  power  which  multiplies  them.  It  sobers 
and  clarifies  human  thinking  a  little,  perhaps,  to  reflect 
on  how  thin  a  line  separates  the  sublime  and  the  ridicu- 
lous, the  saint  and  the  sensualist,  the  martyr  and  the 
fool,  the  genius  and  the  freak. 

Now,  with  this  selfish  individualism  which  we  call  nat- 
uralism we  shall  have  much  to  do,  for  it  plays  an  increas- 
ing role  in  the  modern  world;  it  is  the  neo-paganism 
which  we  may  see  spreading  about  us.  Sophistries  of  all 
kinds  become  the  powerful  allies  of  this  sort  of  moral 
and  aesthetic  anarchy.  Its  votaries  are  those  sorts  of 
rebels  who  invariably  make  their  minds  not  their  friends 
but  their  accomplices.  They  are  ingenious  in  the  art  of 
letting  themselves  go  and  at  the  same  time  thinking  them- 
selves controlled  and  praiseworthy.  The  naturalist,  then, 
ignores  the  group ;  he  flaunts  impartially  both  the  classic 
and  the  religious  law.  He  is  equally  unwilling  to  submit 
to  a  power  imposed  from  above  and  without,  or  to  accept 
those  restrictions  of  society,  self-imposed  by  man's  own 
codified  and  corrected  observations  of  the  natural  world 
and  his  own  impulses.  He  jeers  at  the  one  as  hypocrisy 

38 


THE  LEARNER,  THE  DOER,  THE  SEER 

and  superstition  and  at  the  other  as  mere  "middle-class 
respectability."  He  himself  is  the  perpetual  Ajax  stand- 
ing defiant  upon  the  headland  of  his  own  inflamed  de- 
sires, and  scoffing  at  the  lightnings  either  of  heaven  or 
society.  Neither  devoutness  nor  progress  but  mere  per- 
sonal expansion  is  his  goal.  The  humanist  curbs  both  the 
flesh  and  the  imagination  by  a  high  doctrine  of  expedi- 
ency. Natural  values  are  always  critically  appraised  in 
the  light  of  humane  values,  which  is  nearly,  if  not  quite, 
the  same  as  saying  that  the  individual  desires  and  de- 
lights must  be  conformed  to  the  standards  of  the  group. 
There  can  be  no  anarchy  of  the  imagination,  no  license 
of  the  mind,  no  unbridled  will.  Humanism,  no  less  than 
religion,  is  nobly,  though  not  so  deeply,  traditional.  But 
there  is  no  tradition  to  the  naturalist;  not  the  normal 
and  representative,  but  the  unique  and  spectacular  is  his 
goal.  Novelty  and  expansion,  not  form  and  proportion, 
are  his  goddesses.  Not  truth  and  duty,  but  instinct  and 
appetite,  are  in  the  saddle.  He  will  try  any  horrid  experi- 
ment from  which  he  may  derive  a  new  sensation. 

Over  against  them  both  stands  the  man  of  religion 
with  his  vision  of  the  whole  and  his  consequent  law  of 
proud  humility.  The  next  three  chapters  will  try  to  dis- 
cuss in  detail  these  several  attitudes  toward  life  and  their 
respective  manifestations  in  contemporary  society. 


39 


CHAPTER  TWO 
The  Children  of  Zion  and  the  Sons  of  Greece 

WE  are  not  using  the  term  "humanism"  in  this 
chapter  in  its  strictly  technical  sense.  Be- 
cause we  are  not  concerned  with  the  history 
of  thought  merely,  but  also  with  its  practical  embodi- 
ments in  various  social  organizations  as  well.  So  we 
mean  by  "humanism"  not  only  those  modes  and 
systems  of  thought  in  which  human  interests  predomi- 
nate but  also  the  present  economic,  political  and  eccle- 
siastical institutions  which  more  or  less  consistently  ex- 
press them.  Hence,  the  term  as  used  will  include  concepts 
not  always  agreeing  with  each  other,  and  sometimes  only 
semi-related  to  the  main  stream  of  the  movement.  This 
need  not  trouble  us.  Strict  intellectual  consistency  is  a 
fascinating  and  impossible  goal  of  probably  dubious 
value.  Moreover,  it  is  this  whole  expression  of  the  time 
spirit  which  bathes  the  sensitive  personality  of  the 
preacher,  persuading  and  moulding  him  quite  as  much 
by  its  derived  and  concrete  manifestations  in  contempo- 
rary society  as  by  its  essential  and  abstract  principles. 

There  are  then  two  sets  of  media  through  which  hu- 
manism has  affected  preaching.  The  first  are  philosophi- 
cal and  find  their  expression  in  a  large  body  of  literature 
which  has  been  moulding  thought  and  feeling  for  nearly 
four  centuries.  Humanism  begins  with  the  general 
abstract  assumption  that  all  which  men  can  know,  or 

40 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

need  to  know,  are  "natural"  and  human  values ;  that  they 
have  no  means  of  getting  outside  the  inexorable  circle 
of  their  own  experience. 

Much,  of  course,  depends  here  upon  the  sense  in 
which  the  word  "experience"  is  used.  The  assumption 
need  not  necessarily  be  challenged  except  where,  as  is 
very  often  the  case,  an  arbitrarily  limited  definition  of 
experience  is  intended.  From  this  general  assumption 
flows  the  subjective  theory  of  morals ;  from  it  is  derived 
the  conviction  that  the  rationalistic  values  in  religion  are 
the  only  real,  or  at  least  demonstrable,  ones;  and  hence 
from  this  comes  the  shifting  of  the  seat  of  religious 
authority  from  "revelation"  to  experience.  In.  so  far  as 
this  is  a  correction  of  emphasis  only,  or  the  abandon- 
ment of  a  misleading  term  rather  than  the  denial  of  one 
of  the  areas  and  modes  of  understanding,  again  we  have 
no  quarrel  with  it.  But  if  it  means  an  exclusion  of  the 
supersenuous  sources  of  knowledge  or  the  denial  of 
the  existence  of  absolute  values  as  the  source  of  our 
relative  and  subjective  understanding,  then  it  strikes  at 
the  heart  of  religion.  Because  the  religious  life  is  built 
on  those  factors  of  experience  that  lie  above  the  strictly 
rational  realm  of  consciousness  just  as  the  pagan  view 
rests  on  primitive  instincts  that  lie  beneath  it.  Of  course, 
in  asserting  the  importance  of  these  "supersensuous" 
values  the  religionist  does  not  mean  that  they  are  be- 
yond the  reach  of  human  appraisal  or  unrelated  by  their 
nature  to  the  rest  of  our  understanding.  By  the  intuitive 
he  does  not  mean  the  uncritical  nor  by  the  supersensu- 
ous the  supernatural  in  the  old  and  discredited  sense  of 
an  arbitrary  and  miraculous  revelation.  Mysticism  is 
not  superstition,  nor  are  the  insights  of  the  poet  the 
whimsies  of  the  mere  impressionist.  But  he  insists  that  the 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

humanist,  in  his  ordinary  definition  of  experience,  ig- 
nores or  denies  these  superrational  values.  In  opposition 
to  him  he  rests  his  faith  on  that  definition  of  experience 
which  underlies  Aristotle's  statement  that  "the  intellect 
is  dependent  upon  intuition  for  knowledge  both  of  what 
is  below  and  what  is  above  itself." 

Now  it  is  this  first  set  of  factors  which  are  the  more 
important.  For  the  cause,  as  distinguished  from  the  oc- 
casions, of  our  present  religious  scale  of  values  is,  like 
all  major  causes,  not  practical  but  ideal,  and  its  roots 
are  found  far  beneath  the  soil  of  the  present  in  the  be- 
ginnings of  the  modern  age  in  the  fourteenth  century. 
It  was  then  that  our  world  was  born ;  it  is  of  the  essence 
of  that  world  that  it  arose  out  of  indifference  toward 
speculative  thinking  and  unfaith  in  those  concepts  re- 
garding the  origin  and  destiny  of  mankind  which  spec- 
ulative philosophy  tried  to  express  and  prove. 

From  the  first,  then,  humanistic  leaders  have  not  only 
frankly  rejected  the  scholastic  theologies,  which  had 
been  the  traditional  expression  of  those  absolute  values 
with  which  the  religious  experience  is  chiefly  concerned, 
but  also  ignored  or  rejected  the  existence  of  those  values 
themselves.  Thus  Petrarch  is  generally  considered  the 
first  of  modern  humanists.  He  not  only  speaks  of  Rome 
— meaning  the  whole  semi-political,  semi-ecclesiastical 
structure  of  dogmatic  supernaturalism — as  that  "pro- 
fane Babylon"  but  also  reveals  his  rejection  of  the  dis- 
tinctively religious  experience  itself  by  characterizing  as 
"an  impudent  wench"  the  Christian  church.  The  attack 
is  partly  therefore  on  the  faith  in  transcendent  values 
which  fixes  man's  relative  position  by  projecting  him 
upon  the  screen  of  an  infinite  existence  and  which  asserts 
that  he  has  an  absolute,  that  is,  an  other-than-human 

42 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

guide.  Again  Erasmus,  in  his  Praise  of  Folly,  denounces 
indiscriminately  churches,  priesthoods,  dogmas,  ethi- 
cal values,  the  whole  structure  of  organized  religion, 
calling  it  those  "foul  smelling  weeds  of  theology."  It 
was  inevitable  that  such  men  as  Erasmus  and  Thomas 
More  should  hold  aloof  from  the  Reformation,  not,  as 
has  been  sometimes  asserted,  from  any  lack  of  moral 
courage  but  because  of  intellectual  conviction.  They  saw 
little  to  choose  between  Lutheran,  Calvinistic  and  Romish 
dogmatism.  They  had  rejected  not  only  mediaeval  eccle- 
siasticism  but  also  that  view  of  the  world  founded  on 
supersensuous  values,  whose  persistent  intimations  had 
produced  the  speculative  and  scholastic  theologies.  To 
them,  in  a  quite  literal  sense,  the  proper  study  of  man- 
kind was  man. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  speak  here  of  the  attitude 
towards  the  old  "supernatural"  religion  taken  by  the 
English  Deists  of  the  last  half  of  the  seventeenth  and 
first  half  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Here  was  the 
first  definite  struggle  of  the  English  church  with  a 
group  of  thinkers  who,  under  the  leadership  of  Shaftes- 
bury,  Bolingbroke  and  others,  attempted  to  adapt  hu- 
manistic philosophy  to  theological  speculation,  to  estab- 
lish the  sufficiency  of  natural  religion  as  opposed  to 
revelation,  and  to  deny  the  unique  significance  of  the  Old 
and  New  Testament  Scriptures.  The  English  Deists  were 
not  deep  or  comprehensive  thinkers,  but  they  were  typ- 
ically humanistic  in  that  their  interests  were  not  mainly 
theological  or  religious  but  rather  those  of  a  general  cul- 
ture. They  were  inconsistent  with  their  humanism  in 
their  doctrine  of  a  personal  God  who  was  not  only  re- 
mote but  separated  from  his  universe,  a  deus  ex  maehina 
who  excluded  the  idea  of  immanence.  While  less  influ- 

43 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

ential  in  England,  they  had  a  powerful  effect  upon 
French  and  German  thinking.  Both  Voltaire  and  Rous- 
seau were  rationalists  and  Deists  to  the  end  of  their  days 
and  both  were  unwearied  foes  of  any  other-than-natural 
sources  for  our  spiritual  knowledge  and  religious  values. 

In  Germany  the  humanistic  movement  continued  un- 
der Herder  and  his  younger  contemporaries,  Schiller  and 
Goethe.  Its  historical  horizon,  racial  and  literary  sympa- 
thies, broadened  under  their  direction,  moving  farther 
and  farther  beyond  the  sources  and  areas  of  accepted 
religious  ideas  and  practices.  They  led  the  revival  of 
study  of  the  Aryan  languages  and  cultures ;  especially 
those  of  the  Hellenes  and  the  inhabitants  of  the  Indian 
peninsula.  They  originated  that  critical  and  rather  hos- 
tile scrutiny  of  Semitic  ideas  and  values  in  present  civili- 
zation, which  plays  no  small  part  in  the  dilettante  nat- 
uralism of  the  moment.  Thus  the  nature  and  place  of 
man,  under  the  influence  of  these  "uninspired"  literatures 
and  cultures,  became  more  and  more  important  as  both 
his  person  and  his  position  in  the  cosmos  ceased  to  be 
interpreted  either  in  those  terms  of  the  moral  transcend- 
ence of  deity,  or  of  the  helplessness  and  insignificance 
of  his  creatures,  which  inform  both  the  Jewish-Chris- 
tian Scriptures  and  the  philosophic  absolutism  of  the 
Catholic  theologies. 

But  the  humanism  of  the  eighteenth  century  comes 
most  closely  to  grips  with  the  classic  statements  and 
concepts  of  religion  in  the  critical  philosophy  of  Kant. 
It  is  the  intellectual  current  which  rises  in  him  which  is 
finding  its  last  multifarious  and  minute  rivulets  in  the 
various  doctrines  of  relativity,  in  pragmatism,  the  sub- 
jectivism of  the  neo-realists,  and  in  the  superior  place 
generally  ascribed  by  present  thinking  to  value  judg- 

44 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

ments  as  against  existential  ones.  His  central  insist- 
ence is  upon  the  impossibility  of  any  knowledge  of 
God  as  an  objective  reality.  Speculative  reason  does  in- 
deed give  us  the  idea  of  God  but  he  denies  that  we  have 
in  the  idea  itself  any  ground  for  thinking  that  there  is 
an  objective  reality  corresponding  to  it.  The  idea  he  ad- 
mits as  necessitated  by  "the  very  nature  of  reason"  but 
it  serves  a  purely  harmonizing  office.  It  is  here  to  give 
coherence  and  unity  to  the  objects  of  the  understanding, 
"to  finish  and.  crown  the  whole  of  human  knowledge."1 
Experience  of  transcendence  thus  becomes  impossible. 
As  Professor  McGiffert  in  The  Modern  Ideas  of  God 
says:  "Subjectively  considered,  religion  is  the  recogni- 
tion of  our  duties  as  commands  of  God.  When  we  do 
our  duty  we  are  virtuous ;  when  we  recognize  it  as  com- 
manded by  God  we  are  religious.  The  notion  that  there 
is  anything  we  can  do  to  please  God  except  to  live 
rightly  is  superstition.  Moreover,  to  think  that  we  can 
distinguish  works  of  grace  from  works  of  nature,  which 
is  the  essence  of  historic  Christianity,  or  that  we  can  de- 
tect the  activity  of  heavenly  influences  is  also  supersti- 
tion. All  such  supernaturalism  lies  beyond  our  ken.  There 
are  three  common  forms  of  superstition,  all  promoted 
by  positive  religion:  the  belief  in  miracles,  the  belief  in 
mysteries,  and  the  belief  in  the  means  of  grace."2  So 
prayer  is  a  confession  of  weakness,  not  a  source  of 
strength. 

Kant  is  more  than  once  profoundly  inconsistent  with 
the  extreme  subjectivism  of  his  theory  of  ideas  as  when 
he  says  in  the  Practical  Reason:  "Two  things  fill  the 
mind  with  ever  new  and  increasing  admiration  and  awe 

1  See  The  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  (Muller,  tr.),  pp.  575  ff. 

2  Harvard  Theo.  Rev.,  vol.  I,  no.  1,  p.  16. 

45 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

the  oftener  and  the  more  steadily  we  reflect  on  them: 
the  starry  heavens  above  and  the  moral  law  within."1 
Again  he  remarks,  "The  belief  in  a  great  and  wise 
Author  of  the  world  has  been  supported  entirely  by  the 
wonderful  beauty,  order  and  providence,  everywhere 
displayed  in  nature."2  Here  the  objective  reality  both  of 
what  is  presented  to  our  senses  and  what  is  conceived  of 
in  the  mind,  is,  as  though  unconsciously,  taken  for 
granted.  Thus  while  he  contends  for  a  practical  theism, 
the  very  basis  of  his  interest  still  rests  in  the  conviction 
of  a  Being  external  to  us  and  existing  independent  of  our 
thought. 

But  his  intention  of  making  right  conduct  the  essence 
of  religion  is  typical  of  the  limits  of  humanistic  interests 
and  perceptions.  In  making  his  division  of  reason  into 
the  theoretical  and  the  practical,  it  is  to  the  latter  realm 
that  he  assigns  morality  and  religion.  Clearly  this  is  gen- 
uine rationalism.  I  am  not  forgetting  Kant's  great  reli- 
gious contribution.  He  was  the  son  of  devout  German 
pietists  and  saturated  in  the  literature  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. It  is  to  Amos,  who  may  justly  be  called  his  spirit- 
ual father,  that  he  owes  the  moral  absoluteness  of  his 
categorical  imperative,  the  reading  of  history  as  a  moral 
order.  He  was  following  Amos  when  he  took  God  out 
of  the  physical  and  put  Him  into  the  moral  sphere  and 
interpreted  Him  in  the  terms  of  purpose.  But  the  doc- 
trine of  The  Critique  of  Practical  Reason  is  intended  to 
negate  those  transcendent  elements  generally  believed  to 
be  the  distinctive  portions  of  religion.  God  is  not  known 
to  us  as  an  objective  being,  an  entity  without  ourselves. 
He  is  an  idea,  a  belief,  which  gives  meaning  to  our  ethi- 

1  The  Critique  of  Practical  Reason  (tr.  T.  K.  Abbott),  p.  260. 

2  The  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,  p.  702. 

46 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

cal  life,  a  subjective  necessity.  He  is  a  postulate  of  the 
moral  will.  To  quote  Professor  McGiffert  again:  "We 
do  not  get  God  from  the  universe,  we  give  Him  to  the 
universe.  We  read  significance  and  moral  purpose  into  it. 
We  assume  God,  not  to  account  for  the  world,  but  for 
the  subjective  need  of  realizing  our  highest  good.  .  .  . 
Religion  becomes  a  creative  act  of  the  moral  will  just 
as  knowledge  is  a  creative  act  of  the  understanding."1 
Thus  there  are  no  ultimate  values ;  at  least  we  can  know 
nothing  of  them;  we  have  nothing  to  look  to  which  is 
objective  and  changeless.  The  absolutism  of  the  Cate- 
gorical Imperative  is  a  subjective  one,  bounded  by  our- 
selves, formed  of  our  substance.  Religion  is  not  dis- 
covered, but  self-created,  a  sort  of  sublime  expediency. 
It  can  carry,  then,  no  confident  assertion  as  to  the  mean- 
ing and  destiny  of  the  universe  as  a  whole. 

Here,  then,  the  nature  of  morality,  the  inspiration 
for  character,  the  solution  of  human  destiny,  are  not 
sought  outside  in  some  sort  of  cosmic  relationship,  but 
within,  either  in  the  experience  of  the  superman,  the 
genius  or  the  hero,  or,  as  later,  in  the  collective  experi- 
ence and  consciousness  of  the  group.  Thus  this,  too, 
throws  man  back  upon  himself,  makes  a  new  exaltation 
of  personality  in  sharpest  contrast  to  the  scholastic  doc- 
trine of  the  futility  and  depravity  of  human  nature.  It 
produces  the  assertion  of  the  sacred  character  of  the  in- 
dividual human  being.  The  conviction  of  the  immeasura- 
ble worth  of  man  is,  of  course,  a  characteristic  teaching 
of  Jesus;  what  it  is  important  for  the  preacher  to  re- 
member in  humanism  is  the  source,  not  the  fact,  of  its 
estimate.  With  Jesus  man's  is  a  derived  greatness  found 
in  him  as  the  child  of  the  Eternal ;  in  humanism,  it  is, 

1 H.  T.  R.,  vol.  I,  no.  1,  p.  18. 

47 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

so  to  speak,  self-originated,  born  of  present  worth,  not 
of  sublime  origin  or  shining  destiny. 

So  man  in  the  humanistic  movement  moves  into  the 
center  of  his  own  world,  becomes  himself  the  measuring 
rod  about  whom  all  other  values  are  grouped.  In  the 
place  of  inspiration,  or  prophetic  understanding,  which 
carries  the  implications  of  a  transcendent  source  of  truth 
and  goodness,  we  have  a  sharply  limited,  subjective  wis- 
dom and  insight.  The  "thus  saith  the  Lord"  of  the  He- 
brew prophet  means  nothing  here.  The  humanist  is,  of 
course,  confronted  with  the  eternal  question  of  origins, 
of  the  thing-in-itself ,  the  question  whose  insistence  makes 
the  continuing  worth  of  the  absolutist  speculations.  He 
begs  the  question  by  answering  it  with  an  assertion,  not 
an  explanation.  He  meets  it  by  an  exaltation  of  human 
genius.  Genius  explains  all  sublime  achievements  and 
genius  is,  so  to  speak,  its  own  fans  et  origo.  Thus  Did- 
erot says:  "Genius  is  the  higher  activity  of  the  soul." 
"Genius,"  remarks  Rousseau  in  a  letter,  "makes  knowl- 
edge unnecessary."  And  Kant  defines  genius  as  "the  talent 
to  discover  that  which  cannot  be  taught  or  learned."1 
This  appears  to  be  more  of  an  evasion  than  a  definition ! 
But  the  intent  here  is  to  refer  all  that  seems  to  transcend 
mundane  categories,  man's  highest,  his  widest,  his 
sublimest  intuitions  and  achievements,  back  to  himself ; 
he  is  his  own  source  of  light  and  power. 

Such  an  anthropocentric  view  of  life  and  destiny  in 
exalting  man,  of  course,  thereby  liberated  him,  not 
merely  from  ecclesiastical  domination,  but  also  from 
those  illusive  fears  and  questionings,  those  remote  and 
imaginative  estimates  of  his  own  intended  worth  and 
those  consequent  exacting  demands  upon  himself  which 

1  Anthropologie,  para.  87  c. 

48 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

are  a  part  of  the  religious  interpretation  of  life.  Human- 
istic writing  is  full  of  the  exulting  sense  of  this  emanci- 
pation. These  superconsiderations  do  not  belong  in  the 
world  of  experience  as  the  humanist  ordinarily  con- 
ceives of  it.  Hence,  man  lives  in  an  immensely  con- 
tracted, but  a  very  real  and  tangible  world  and  within 
the  small  experimental  circumference  of  it,  he  holds  a 
far  larger  place  (from  one  viewpoint,  a  far  smaller  one 
from  another)  than  that  of  a  finite  creature  caught  in 
the  snare  of  this  world  and  yet  a  child  of  the  Eternal, 
having  infinite  destinies.  The  humanist  sees  man  as  freed 
from  the  tyranny  of  this  supernatural  revelation  and 
laws.  He  rejoices  over  man  because  now  he  stands, 

"self -poised  on  manhood's  solid  earth 
Not  forced  to  frame  excuses  for  his  birth, 
Fed  from  within  with  all  the  strength  he  needs." 

It  is  this  sense  of  independence  which  arouses  in  Goethe 
a  perennial  enthusiasm.  It  is  the  greatest  bliss,  he  says, 
that  the  humanist  won  back  for  us.  Henceforth,  we  must 
strive  with  all  our  power  to  keep  it. 

We  have  attempted  this  brief  sketch  of  one  of  the 
chief  sources  of  the  contemporary  thought  movement, 
that  we  may  realize  the  pit  whence  we  were  digged,  the 
quarry  from  which  many  corner  stones  in  the  present 
edifice  of  civilization  were  dug.  The  preacher  tends  to 
underestimate  the  comprehensive  character  of  the  per- 
vasive ideas,  worked  into  many  institutions  and  practices, 
which  are  continually  impinging  upon  him  and  his  mes- 
sage. They  form  a  perpetual  attrition,  working  silently 
and  ceaselessly  day  and  night,  wearing  away  the  distinc- 
tively religious  conceptions  of  the  community.  Much  of 

49 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

the  vagueness  and  sentimentalism  of  present  preaching, 
its  uncritical  impressionism,  is  due  to  the  influence  of 
the  non-religious  or,  at  least,  the  insufficiently  religious 
character  of  the  ruling  ideas  and  motives  outside  the 
church  which  are  impinging  upon  it,  and  upon  the  rest 
of  the  thinking  of  the  moment. 

Now,  this  abstract  humanism  of  the  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries  had  a  considerable  influence  upon 
early  American  preaching.  The  latter  part  of  the  eight- 
eenth century  marked  a  breaking  away  from  the  Protes- 
tant scholasticism  of  the  Reformation  theology.  The 
French  Revolution  accented  and  made  operative,  even 
across  the  Atlantic,  the  typical  humanistic  concepts  of 
the  rights  of  man  and  the  sovereignty  of  the  individual 
person.  Skepticism  and  even  atheism  became  a  fashion 
in  our  infant  republic.  It  was  a  mark  of  sophistication 
with  many  educated  men  to  regard  Christianity  as  not 
worthy  of  serious  consideration.  College  students  mod- 
estly admitted  that  they  were  infidels  and  with  a  delicious 
naivete  assumed  the  names  of  Voltaire,  Thomas  Paine 
and  even  of  that  notorious  and  notable  egotist  Rousseau. 
It  is  said  that  in  1795,  on  the  first  Sunday  of  President 
Dwight's  administration  in  Yale  College,  only  three  un- 
dergraduates remained  after  service  to  take  the  sacra- 
ment. The  reasons  were  partly  political,  probably,  but 
these  themselves  were  grounded  in  the  new  philosophi- 
cal, anti-religious  attitude. 

Of  course,  this  affected  the  churches.  There  was  a  re- 
action from  Protestant  scholasticism  within  them  which, 
later  on,  culminated  in  Unitarianism,  Universalism  and 
Arminianism.  The  most  significant  thing  in  the  Unitarian 
movement  was  not  its  rejection  of  the  Trinitarian  specu- 
lation, but  its  positive  contribution  to  the  reassertion  of 

50 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

Jesus'  doctrine  of  the  worth  and  dignity  of  human  nature. 
But  it  recovered  that  doctrine  much  more  by  the  way  of 
humanistic  philosophy  than  by  way  of  the  teaching  of  the 
New  Testament.  I  suppose  the  thing  which  has  made  the 
weakness  of  the  Unitarian  movement,  its  acknowledged 
lack  of  religious  warmth  and  feeling,  is  due  not  to  the 
place  where  it  stands,  but  to  the  road  by  which  it  got 
there. 

Yet,  take  it  for  all  in  all,  the  effect  upon  the  preach- 
ing of  the  supernatural  and  speculative  doctrines  and  in- 
sights of  Christianity,  was  not  in  America  as  great  as 
might  be  expected.  Kant  died  in  1804,  and  Goethe  in 
1832,  but  only  in  the  last  sixty  years  has  the  preaching 
of  the  "evangelical"  churches  been  fundamentally  af- 
fected by  the  prevailing  intellectual  currents  of  the  day. 
This  is  due,  I  think,  to  two  causes.  One  was  the  nature 
of  the  German  Reformation.  It  found  preaching  at  a 
low  ebb.  Every  great  force,  scholastic,  popular,  mystical, 
which  had  contributed  to  the  splendor  of  the  mediaeval 
pulpit  had  fallen  into  decay,  and  the  widespread  moral 
laxity  of  the  clergy  precluded  spiritual  insight.  The  Ref- 
ormation, with  its  ethical  and  political  interests,  revived 
preaching  and  by  the  nature  of  these  same  interests  fixed 
the  limits  and  determined  the  direction  within  which  it 
should  develop.  It  is  important  to  remember  that  Luther 
did  not  break  with  the  old  theological  system.  He  con- 
tinued his  belief  in  an  authority  and  revelation  anterior, 
exterior  and  superior  to  man,  merely  shifting  the  locus 
of  that  authority  from  the  Church  to  the  Book.  Thus 
he  paved  the  way  for  Zwingli  and  the  Protestant  scholas- 
ticism which  became  more  rigid  and  sterile  than  the 
Catholic  which  it  succeeded.  We  usually  regard  the  Ref- 
ormation as  a  part  of  the  Renaissance  and  hence  in- 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

eluded  in  the  humanistic  movement.  Politically  and  reli- 
giously, it  undoubtedly  should  be  so  regarded,  for  it  was 
a  chief  factor  in  the  renewal  of  German  nationalism  and 
its  central  doctrines  of  justification  by  faith,  and  the 
right  of  each  separate  believer  to  an  unmediated  ac- 
cess to  the  Highest,  exalted  the  integrity  and  dignity  of 
the  individual.  Inconsistently,  however,  it  continued  the 
old  theological  tradition.  In  the  Lutheran  system,  says 
Paul  de  Lagarde,  we  see  the  Catholic  scholastic  struc- 
ture standing  untouched  with  the  exception  of  a  few 
loci.  And  Harnack,  in  the  Dogmengeschichte  calls  it  "a 
miserable  duplication  of  the  Catholic  Church." 

Now,  New  England  preaching,  it  is  true,  found  its 
chief  roots  in  Calvinism;  Calvin,  rather  than  Luther, 
was  the  religious  leader  of  the  Reformation  outside 
Germany.  But  his  system,  also,  is  only  the  continuation 
of  the  ancient  philosophy  of  the  Christian  faith  originat- 
ing with  Augustine.  He  reduced  it  to  order,  expounded 
it  with  energy  and  consistency,  but  one  has  only  to  recall 
its  major  doctrines  of  the  depravity  of  man,  the  atone- 
ment for  sin,  the  irresistible  grace  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  to 
see  how  untouched  it  was  by  the  characteristic  postulates 
of  the  new  humanism.  And  it  was  on  his  theology  that 
New  England  preaching  was  founded.  It  was  Calvin 
who,  through  Jonathan  Edwards,  the  elder  and  the 
younger,  Joseph  Bellamy,  Samuel  Hopkins,  Nathaniel 
Emmons,  Nathaniel  N.  Taylor,  determined  the  course 
of  the  New  England  pulpit. 

The  other  reason  for  our  relative  immunity  from  hu- 
manistic influence  is  accidental  and  complementary 
merely.  It  is  the  mere  fact  of  our  physical  isolation, 
which,  until  the  last  seventy-five  years,  quite  largely  shut 
off  thinkers  here  from  continental  and  English  currents 

52 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

of  thought  and  contributed  to  the  brilliant,  if  sterile, 
provincialism  of  the  New  England  theology. 

It  is,  therefore,  to  the  second  set  of  media,  which  may 
be  generally  characterized  as  scientific  and  practical,  that 
we  now  turn.  These  are  the  forces  which  apparently  are 
most  affecting  Christian  preaching  at  this  moment.  But 
it  is  important  to  remember  that  a  large  part  of  their  in- 
fluence is  to  be  traced  to  the  philosophic  and  ethical  ten- 
dencies of  the  earlier  humanistic  movement  which  had 
set  the  scene  for  them,  to  which  they  are  so  sympathetic 
that  we  may  assert  that  it  is  in  them  that  their  practical 
interests  are  grounded  and  by  them  that  their  scientific 
methods  are  reinforced.  I  divide  this  second  group  of 
media,  for  clearness,  under  three  heads. 

First  comes  the  rise  of  the  natural  sciences.  In  1859, 
Darwin  published  the  Origin  of  Species  and  gave  to  the 
world  the  evolutionary  hypothesis,  foreshadowed  by 
Goethe  and  other  eighteenth-century  thinkers,  simulta- 
neously formulated  by  Wallace  and  himself.  Here  is  a 
theory,  open  to  objections  certainly,  not  yet  conclusively 
demonstrated,  but  the  most  probable  one  which  we  yet 
possess,  as  to  the  method  of  the  appearance  and  the  con- 
tinuance of  life  upon  the  planet.  It  conceives  of  creation 
as  an  unimaginably  long  and  intricate  development  from 
the  inorganic  to  the  organic,  from  simple  to  complex 
forms  of  life.  Like  Kantianism  and  the  humanistic 
movement  generally,  the  evolutionary  hypothesis  springs 
from  reasoned  observation  of  man  and  nature,  not  from 
any  a  priori  or  speculative  process.  With  this  theory,  long 
a  regulative  idea  of  our  world,  preaching  was  forced  to 
come  to  some  sort  of  an  understanding.  It  strikes  a 
powerful  blow  at  the  scholastic  notion  of  a  dichotomized 
universe  divided  between  nature  and  supernature,  divine 

S3 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

and  human.  It  reinforced  humanism  by  minimizing,  if 
not  making  unnecessary,  the  objective  and  external 
source  and  external  interpretations  of  religions.  It  pushes 
back  the  initial  creative  act  until  it  is  lost  in  the  mists 
and  chaos  of  an  unimaginably  remote  past.  Meanwhile, 
creative  energy,  the  very  essence  of  transcendent  life,  is, 
as  we  know  it,  not  transcendent  at  all,  but  working  out- 
ward from  within,  a  part  of  the  process,  not  above  and 
beyond  it.  The  inevitable  implication  here  is  that  God  is 
sufficiently,  if  not  exclusively,  known  through  natural 
and  human  media.  Science  recognizes  Him  in  the  terms 
of  its  own  categories  as  in  and  of  His  world,  a  part  of 
all  its  ongoings  and  developments.  But  His  creative  life  is 
indistinguishable  from,  if  not  identical  with,  its  expres- 
sions. Here,  then,  is  a  practical  obliteration  of  the  line 
once  so  sharply  drawn  between  the  natural  and  the  super- 
natural. Hence  the  demarcation  between  the  divine  and 
human  into  mutually  exclusive  states  has  disappeared. 

This  would  seem,  then,  to  wipe  out  also  any  knowledge 
of  absolute  values.  Christian  theism  has  interpreted  God 
largely  in  static,  final  terms.  The  craving  for  the  absolute 
in  the  human  mind,  as  witnessed  by  the  long  course  of 
the  history  of  thought,  as  pathetically  witnessed  to  in  the 
mixture  of  chicanery,  fanaticism  and  insight  of  the 
modern  mystical  and  occult  healing  sects,  is  central  and 
immeasurable.  But  God,  found,  if  at  all,  in  the  terms 
of  a  present  process,  is  not  static  and  absolute,  but  dy- 
namic and  relative ;  indefinite,  incomplete,  not  final.  And 
man's  immense  difference  from  Him,  that  sense  of  the 
immeasurable  space  between  creator  and  created,  is 
strangely  contracted.  The  gulf  between  holiness  and 
guiltiness  tends  also  to  disappear.  For  our  life  would  ap- 
pear to  be  plastic  and  indefinite,  a  process  rather  than  a 

54 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

state,  not  open  then  to  conclusive  moral  estimates;  in- 
complete, not  fallen;  life  an  orderly  process,  hence  not 
perverse  but  defensible;  without  known  breaks  or  in- 
fringements, hence  relatively  normal  and  sufficiently  in- 
telligible. 

A  second  factor  was  the  rise  of  the  humane  sciences. 
In  the  seventh  and  eighth  decades  of  the  last  century 
men  were  absorbed  in  the  discovery  of  the  nature  and 
extent  of  the  material  universe.  But  beginning  about 
1890,  interest  swerved  again  toward  man  as  its  most  re- 
vealing study  and  most  significant  inhabitant.  Anthro- 
pology, ethnology,  sociology,  physical  and  functional  psy- 
chology, came  to  the  front.  Especially  the  humane  studies 
of  political  science  and  industrial  economics  were  magni- 
fied because  of  the  new  and  urgent  problems  born  of  an 
industrial  civilization  and  a  capitalistic  state.  The  inven- 
tion and  perfection  of  the  industrial  machine  had  by 
now  thoroughly  dislocated  former  social  groupings, 
made  its  own  ethical  standards  and  human  problems.  In 
the  early  days  of  the  labor  movement  William  Morris 
wrote,  "we  have  become  slaves  of  the  monster  to  which 
invention  has  given  birth."  In  1853,  shortly  after  the  in- 
troduction of  the  cotton  gin  into  India,  the  Viceroy 
wrote:  "The  misery  is  scarcely  paralleled  in  the  history 
of  trade."  (A  large  statement  that!)  "The  bones  of  the 
cotton  workers  whiten  the  plains  of  India." 

But  the  temporary  suffering  caused  by  the  immediate 
crowding  out  of  cottage  industry  and  the  abrupt  increase 
in  production  was  insignificant  beside  the  deeper  influ- 
ence, physical,  moral,  mental,  of  the  machine  in  chang- 
ing the  permanent  habitat  and  the  entire  mode  of  living 
for  millions  of  human  beings.  It  removed  them  from 
those  healthy  rural  surroundings  which  preserve  the 

55 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

half -primitive,  half-poetic  insight  into  the  nature  of 
things  which  comes  from  relative  isolation  and  close  con- 
tact with  the  soil,  to  the  nervous  tension,  the  amoral  con- 
ditions, the  airless,  lightless  ugliness  of  the  early  factory 
settlements.  Here  living  conditions  were  not  merely 
beastly;  they  were  often  bestial.  The  economic  helpless- 
ness of  the  factory  hands  reduced  them  to  essential  slav- 
ery. They  must  live  where  the  factory  was,  and  could 
work  only  in  one  factory,  for  they  could  not  afford  to 
move.  Hence  they  must  obey  their  industrial  master  in 
every  particular,  since  the  raw  material,  the  plant,  the 
tools,  the  very  roof  that  covered  them,  were  all  his !  In 
this  new  human  condition  was  a  powerful  reinforcement, 
from  another  angle  of  approach,  of  the  humanistic  im- 
pulse. Man's  interest  in  himself,  which  had  been  some- 
times that  of  the  dilettante,  largely  imaginative  and  even 
sentimental,  was  reinforced  by  man's  new  distress  and 
became  concrete  and  scientific. 

Thus  man  regarded  himself  and  his  own  world  with 
a  new  and  urgent  attention.  The  methods  and  secondary 
causes  of  his  intellectual,  emotional  and  volitional  life 
began  to  be  laid  bare.  The  new  situation  revealed  the  im- 
mense part  played  in  shaping  the  personality  and  the  fate 
of  the  individual  by  inheritance  and  environment.  The 
Freudian  doctrine,  which  traces  conduct  and  habit  back 
to  early  or  prenatal  repressions,  strengthens  the  interest 
in  the  physical  and  materialistic  sources  of  character  and 
conduct  in  human  life.  Behavioristic  psychology,  inter- 
preting human  nature  in  terms  of  observation  and  action, 
rather  than  analysis  and  value  judgments,  does  the  same. 
It  tends  to  put  the  same  emphasis  upon  the  external  and 
sensationalistic  aspects  of  human  experience. 

That,  then,  which  is  a  central  force  in  religion,  the 

56 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

sense  of  the  inscrutability  of  human  nature,  the  feeling 
of  awe  before  the  natural  processes,  what  Paul  called 
the  mystery  of  iniquity  and  the  mystery  of  godliness, 
tends  to  disappear.  Wonder  and  confident  curiosity  suc- 
ceed humility  and  awe.  That  which  is  of  the  essence  of 
religion,  the  sense  of  helplessness  coupled  with  the  sense 
of  responsibility,  is  stifled.  Whatever  else  the  humane 
sciences  have  done,  they  have  deepened  man's  fasci- 
nated and  narrowing  absorption  in  himself  and  given  him 
apparent  reason  to  believe  that  by  analyzing  the  iron 
chain  of  cause  and  effect  which  binds  the  process  and 
admitting  that  it  permits  no  deflection  or  variation,  he  is 
making  the  further  questions  as  to  the  origin,  meaning 
and  destiny  of  that  process  either  futile  or  superfluous. 
So  that,  in  brief,  the  check  to  speculative  thinking  and 
the  repudiation  of  central  metaphysical  concepts,  which 
the  earlier  movement  brought  about,  has  been  accentu- 
ated and  sealed  by  the  humane  sciences  and  the  new 
and  living  problems  offered  them  for  practical  solution. 
Thus  the  generation  now  ending  has  been  carried  beyond 
the  point  of  combating  ancient  doctrines  of  God  and 
man,  to  the  place  where  it  has  become  comparatively  in- 
different, rather  than  hostile,  to  any  doctrine  of  God,  so 
absorbed  is  it  in  the  physical  functions,  the  temporal 
needs  and  the  material  manifestations  of  human  per- 
sonality. 

Finally,  as  the  natural  and  humane  sciences  mark  new 
steps  in  the  expanding  humanistic  movement,  so  in  these 
last  days,  critical  scholarship,  itself  largely  a  product  of 
the  humanistic  viewpoint,  has  added  another  factor  to 
the  group.  The  new  methods  of  historical  and  literary 
criticism,  of  comparative  investigation  in  religion  and 
the  other  arts,  have  exerted  a  vast  influence  upon  con- 

57 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

temporary  religious  thought.  They  have  not  merely  com- 
pleted the  breakdown  of  an  arbitrary  and  fixed  external 
authority  and  rendered  finally  invalid  the  notion  of  equal 
or  verbal  inspiration  in  sacred  writings,  but  the  present 
tendency,  especially  in  comparative  religion,  is  to  seek 
the  source  of  all  so-called  religious  experience  within  the 
human  consciousness;  particularly  to  derive  it  all  from 
group  experience.  Here,  then,  is  a  theory  of  religious 
origins  which  once  more  turns  the  spirit  of  man  back 
upon  itself.  Robertson  Smith,  Jane  Harrison,  Durkheim, 
rejecting  an  earlier  animistic  theory,  find  the  origin  of 
religion  not  in  contemplation  pf  the  natural  world  and 
in  the  intuitive  perception  of  something  more-than-world 
which  lies  behind  it,  but  in  the  group  experience  whose 
heightened  emotional  intensity  and  nervous  energy  im- 
parts to  the  one  the  exaltation  of  the  many.  Smith,  in  the 
Religion  of  the  Semites,1  emphasizes,  as  the  fundamental 
conception  of  ancient  religion,  "the  solidarity  of  the  gods 
and  their  worshipers  as  part  of  an  organic  society." 
Durkheim  goes  beyond  this.  There  are  not  at  the  be- 
ginning men  and  gods,  but  only  the  social  group  and  the 
collective  emotions  and  representations  which  are  gener- 
ated through  membership  in  the  group. 

Here,  then,  is  humanism  again  carried  to  the  very 
heart  of  the  citadel.  Religion  at  its  source  contains  no 
real  perceptions  of  any  extra-human  force  or  person. 
What  seemed  to  be  such  perceptions  were  only  the  felt 
participation  of  the  individual  in  a  collective  conscious- 
ness which  is  superindividual,  but  not  superhuman  and 
always  continuous  with  the  individual  consciousness.  So 
that,  whatever  may  or  may  not  be  true  later,  the  begin- 
ning of  man's  metaphysical  interests,  his  cosmic  con- 

i  P.  32. 

58 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

sciousness,  his  more-than-human  contacts,  is  simply  his 
social  experience,  his  collective  emotions  and  representa- 
tions. Thus  Durkheim :  "We  are  able  to  say,  in  sum,  that 
the  religious  individual  does  not  deceive  himself  when 
he  believes  in  the  existence  of  a  moral  power  upon  which 
he  depends  and  from  which  he  holds  the  larger  portion  of 
himself.  That  power  exists ;  it  is  society.  When  the  Aus- 
tralian feels  within  himself  the  surging  of  a  life  whose 
intensity  surprises  him,  he  is  the  dupe  of  no  illusion; 
that  exaltation  is  real,  and  it  is  really  the  product  of 
forces  that  are  external  and  superior  to  the  individual."1 
Yes,  but  identical  in  kind  and  genesis  with  himself  and 
his  own  race.  To  Leuba,  in  his  Psychological  Study  of 
Religion,  this  has  already  become  the  accepted  view- 
point. Whatever  is  enduring  and  significant  in  religion  is 
merely  an  expression  of  man's  social  consciousness  and 
experience,  his  sense  of  participation  in  a  common  life. 
"Humanity,  idealized  and  conceived  as  a  manifestation 
of  creative  energy,  possesses  surprising  qualifications  for 
a  source  of  religious  inspiration."  Professor  Overstreet, 
in  "The  Democratic  Conception  of  God,"  Hibbert  Jour- 
nal, volume  XI,  page  409,  says :  "It  is  this  large  figure, 
not  simply  of  human  but  of  cosmic  society  which  is  to 
yield  our  God  of  the  future.  There  is  no  place  in  the 
future  for  an  eternally  perfect  being  and  no  need — so- 
ciety, democratic  from  end  to  end,  can  brook  no  such 
radical  class  distinction  as  that  between  a  supreme  be- 
ing, favored  with  eternal  and  absolute  perfection,  and 
the  mass  of  beings  doomed  to  the  lower  ways  of  imper- 
fect struggle." 

There  is  certainly  a  striking  immediacy  in  such  lan- 

1  Les  Formes  elementaires  de  la  vie  religieuse,  p.  322. 

59 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

guage.  We  leave  for  later  treatment  the  question  as  to 
the  historical  validity  of  such  an  attitude.  It  certainly 
ignores  some  of  the  most  distinguished  and  fruitful  con- 
cepts of  trained  minds;  it  rules  out  of  court  what  are 
to  the  majority  of  men  real  and  precious  factors  in  the 
religious  experience.  It  would  appear  to  be  another  in- 
stance, among  the  many,  of  the  fallacy  of  identifying  the 
part  with  the  whole.  But  the  effect  of  such  pervasive 
thought  currents,  the  more  subtle  and  unfightable  be- 
cause indirect  and  disguised  in  popular  appearance  and 
influence,  upon  the  ethical  and  spiritual  temper  of  reli- 
gious leaders,  the  very  audacity  of  whose  tasks  puts  them 
on  the  defensive,  is  vast  and  incalculable.  At  the  worst, 
it  drives  man  into  a  mechanicalized  universe,  with  a  re- 
sulting materialism  of  thought  and  life;  at  the  best,  it 
makes  him  a  pragmatist  with  amiable  but  immediate  ob- 
jectives, just  practical  "results"  as  his  guide  and  goal. 
Morality  as,  in  Antigone's  noble  phrase,  "the  unwritten 
law  of  heaven"  sinks  down  and  disappears.  There  is  no 
room  here  for  the  Job  who  abhors  himself  and  repents 
in  dust  and  ashes  nor  for  Plato's  One  behind  the  Many; 
no  perceptible  room,  in  such  a  world,  for  any  of  the  ab- 
solute values,  the  transcendent  interests,  the  ethics  of 
idealism,  any  eschatology,  or  for  Christian  theodicy.  That 
which  has  been  the  typical  contribution  of  the  religious 
perceptions  in  the  past,  namely,  the  comprehensive 
vision  of  life  and  the  world  and  time  sub  specie  aeterni- 
tatis  is  here  abandoned.  Eternity  is  unreal  or  empty ;  we 
never  heard  the  music  of  the  spheres.  We  are  facing  at 
this  moment  a  disintegrating  age.  Here  is  a  prime  reason 
for  it.  The  spiritual  solidarity  of  mankind  under  the  hu- 
manistic interpretation  of  life  and  destiny  is  dissolving 
and  breaking  down.  Humanism  is  ingenious  and  reason- 

60 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

able  and  clever  but  it  is  too  limited;  it  doesn't  answer 
enough  questions. 

Before  going  on,  in  a  future  chapter,  to  discuss 
the  question  as  to  what  kind  of  preaching  such  a  world- 
view,  seen  from  the  Christian  standpoint,  needs,  we  are 
now  to  inquire  what  the  effect  of  this  humanistic  move- 
ment upon  Christian  preaching  has  already  been.  That 
our  preaching  should  have  been  profoundly  influenced 
by  it  is  inevitable.  Religion  is  not  apart  from  the  rest  of 
life.  The  very  temperament  of  the  speaker  makes  him 
peculiarly  susceptible  to  the  intellectual  and  spiritual 
movements  about  him.  What,  then,  has  humanism  done 
to  preaching?  Has  it  worked  to  clarify  and  solidify  the 
essence  of  the  religious  position?  Or  has  preaching  de- 
clined and  become  neutralized  in  religious  quality  under 
it? 

First:  it  has  profoundly  affected  Christian  preaching 
about  God.  The  contemporary  sermon  on  Deity  mini- 
mizes or  leaves  out  divine  transcendence ;  thus  it  starves 
one  fundamental  impulse  in  man — the  need  and  desire  to 
look  up.  Instead  of  this  transcendence  modern  preaching 
emphasizes  immanence,  often  to  a  naive  and  ludicrous 
degree.  God  is  the  being  who  is  like  us.  Under  the  influ- 
ence of  that  monistic  idealism,  which  is  a  derived  philos- 
ophy of  the  humanistic  impulse,  preaching  lays  all  the 
emphasis  upon  divine  immanence  in  sharpest  contrast 
either  to  the  deistic  transcendence  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury or  the  separateness  and  aloofness  of  the  God  of  the 
Hebrew  Scriptures,  or  of  the  classic  Greek  theologies  of 
Christianity.  God  is,  of  course ;  that  is,  He  is  the  inform- 
ing principle  in  the  natural  and  human  universe  and  es- 
sentially one  with  it.  Present  preaching  does  not  confess 
this  identification  but  it  evades  rather  than  meets  the  log- 

61 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

ical  pantheistic  conclusion.  So  our  preaching  has  to  do 
with  God  in  the  common  round  of  daily  tasks;  with 
sweeping  a  room  to  His  glory;  with  adoration  of  His 
presence  in  a  sunset  and  worship  of  Him  in  a  star.  Every 
bush's  aflame  with  Him ;  there  are  sermons  in  stones  and 
poems  in  running  brooks.  Before  us,  even  as  behind,  God 
is  and  all  is  well.  We  are  filled  with  a  sort  of  intoxication 
with  this  intimate  and  protective  company  of  the  Infinite ; 
we  are  magnificently  unabashed  as  we  familiarly  ap- 
proach Him.  "Closer  is  He  than  breathing;  nearer  than 
hands  or  feet."  Not  then  by  denying  or  condemning  or 
distrusting  the  world  in  which  we  live,  not  by  asserting 
the  differences  between  God  and  humanity  do  we  under- 
stand Him.  But  by  closest  touch  with  nature  do  we  find 
Him.  By  a  superb  paradox,  not  without  value,  yet  equally 
ineffable  in  sentimentality  and  sublime  in  its  impiety  we 
say,  beholding  man,  "that  which  is  most  human  is  most 
divine !" 

That  there  is  truth  in  such  comfortable  and  affable 
preaching  is  obvious ;  that  there  is  not  much  truth  in  it  is 
obvious,  too.  To  what  extent,  and  in  what  ways,  nature, 
red  with  tooth  and  claw,  indifferent,  ruthless,  whimsical, 
can  be  called  the  expression  of  the  Christian  God,  is  not 
usually  specifically  stated.  In  what  way  man,  just  emerg- 
ing from  the  horror,  the  shame,  the  futility  of  his  last 
and  greatest  debauch  of  bloody  self-destruction,  can  be 
called  the  chief  medium  of  truth,  holiness  and  beauty, 
the  matrix  of  divinity,  is  not  entirely  manifest.  But  the 
fatal  defect  of  such  preaching  is  not  that  there  is  not,  of 
course,  a  real  identity  between  the  world  and  its  Maker, 
the  soul  and  its  Creator,  but  that  the  aspect  of  reality 
which  this  truth  expresses  is  the  one  which  has  least  re- 
ligious value,  is  least  distinctive  in  the  spiritual  experi- 

62 


ence.  The  religious  nature  is  satisfied,  and  the  springs  of 
moral  action  are  refreshed  by  dwelling  on  the  "special- 
ness"  of  God;  men  are  brought  back  to  themselves,  not 
among  their  fellows  and  by  identifying  them  with  their 
fellows,  but  by  lifting  them  to  the  secret  place  of  the 
Most  High.  They  need  religiously  not  thousand-tongued 
nature,  but  to  be  kept  secretly  in  His  pavilion  from  the 
strife  of  tongues.  It  is  the  difference  between  God  and 
men  which  makes  men  who  know  themselves  trust  Him. 
It  is  the  "otherness,"  not  the  sameness,  which  makes  Him 
desirable  and  potent  in  the  daily  round  of  life.  A  purely 
ethical  interest  in  God  ceases  to  be  ethical  and  becomes 
complacent;  when  we  rule  out  the  supraphenomenal  we 
have  shut  the  door  on  the  chief  strength  of  the  higher 
life. 

Second:  modern  preaching,  under  this  same  influence 
and  to  a  yet  greater  degree,  emphasizes  the  principle  of 
identity,  where  we  need  that  of  difference,  in  its  preach- 
ing about  Jesus.  He  is  still  the  most  moving  theme  for 
the  popular  presentation  of  religion.  But  that  is  because 
He  offers  the  most  intelligible  approach  to  that  very 
"otherness"  in  the  person  of  the  godhead.  His  healing 
and  reconciling  influence  over  the  heart  of  man — the  way 
the  human  spirit  expands  and  blossoms  in  His  presence — 
is  moving  beyond  expression  to  any  observer,  religious 
or  irreligious.  Each  new  crusade  in  the  long  strife  for 
human  betterment  looks  in  sublime  confidence  to  Him  as 
its  forerunner  and  defense.  To  what  planes  of  common 
service,  faith,  magnanimous  solicitude  could  He  not  lift 
the  embittered,  worldlyized  men  and  women  of  this  torn 
and  distracted  age,  which  is  so  desperately  seeking  its  own 
life  and  thereby  so  inexorably  losing  it !  But  why  is  the 
heart  subdued,  the  mind  elevated,  the  will  made  tracta- 

63 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

ble  by  Him?  Why,  because  He  is  enough  like  us  so  that 
we  know  that  He  understands,  has  utter  comprehension ; 
and  He  is  enough  different  from  us  so  that  we  are  will- 
ing to  trust  Him.  In  what  lies  the  essence  of  the  leader- 
ship of  Jesus  ?  He  is  not  like  us :  therefore,  we  are  will- 
ing to  relinquish  ourselves  into  His  hands. 

Now,  that  is  only  half  the  truth.  But  if  I  may  use  a 
paradox,  it  is  the  important  half,  the  primary  half.  And 
it  is  just  that  essential  element  in  the  Christian  experience 
of  Jesus  that  modern  preaching,  under  the  humanistic 
impulse,  is  neglecting.  Indeed,  liberal  preachers  have 
largely  ceased  to  sermonize  about  Him,  just  because  it 
has  become  so  easy !  Humanism  has  made  Jesus  obvious, 
hence,  relatively  impotent.  With  its  unified  cosmos,  its 
immanent  God,  its  exalted  humanity,  the  whole  Christo- 
logical  problem  has  become  trivial.  It  drops  the  cosmic 
approach  to  the  person  of  Jesus  in  favor  of  the  ethical. 
It  does  not  approach  Him  from  the  side  of  God ;  we  ap- 
proach nothing  from  that  side  now ;  but  from  the  side  of 
man.  Thus  He  is  not  so  much  a  divine  revelation  as  He 
is  a  human  achievement.  Humanity  and  divinity  are  one 
in  essence.  The  Creator  is  distinguished  from  His  crea- 
tures in  multifarious  differences  of  degree  but  not  in  kind. 
We  do  not  see,  then,  in  Christ,  a  perfect  isolated  God, 
joined  to  a  perfect  isolated  man,  in  what  were  indeed 
the  incredible  terms  of  the  older  and  superseded  Christol- 
ogies.  But  rather,  He  is  the  perfect  revelation  of  the  moral 
being,  the  character  of  God,  in  all  those  ways  capable 
of  expression  or  comprehension  in  human  life,  just  be- 
cause he  is  the  highest  manifestation  of  a  humanity 
through  which  God  has  been  forever  expressing  Himself 
in  the  world.  For  man  is,  so  to  speak,  his  own  cosmic 
center ;  the  greatest  divine  manifestation  which  we  know. 

64 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

Granted,  then,  an  ideal  man,  a  complete  moral  being,  and 
ipso  facto  we  have  our  supreme  revelation  of  God. 

So  runs  the  thrice  familiar  argument.  Of  course,  we 
have  gained  something  by  it.  We  may  drop  gladly  the 
old  dualistic  philosophy,  and  we  must  drop  it,  though  I 
doubt  if  it  is  so  easy  to  drop  the  dualistic  experience 
which  created  it.  But  I  beg  to  point  out  that,  on  the 
whole,  we  have  lost  more  religiously  than  we  have  gained. 
For  we  have  made  Jesus  easy  to  understand,  not  as  He 
brings  us  up  to  His  level,  but  as  we  have  reduced  Him  to 
ours.  Can  we  afford  to  do  that?  Bernard's  mystical  line, 
"The  love  of  Jesus,  what  it  is,  none  but  His  loved  ones 
know,"  has  small  meaning  here.  The  argument  is  very  good 
humanism  but  it  drops  the  word  "Saviour"  out  of  the  vo- 
cabulary of  faith.  Oh,  how  many  sermons  since,  let  us 
say,  1890,  have  been  preached  on  the  text,  "He  that  hath 
seen  me,  hath  seen  the  Father."  And  how  uniformly  the 
sermons  have  explained  that  the  text  means  not  that  Je- 
sus is  like  God,  but  that  God  is  like  Jesus — and  we  have 
already  seen  that  Jesus  is  like  us !  One  only  has  to  state 
it  all  to  see  beneath  its  superficial  reasonableness  its  ap- 
palling profanity ! 

Third :  we  may  see  the  influence  of  humanism  upon  our 
preaching  in  the  relinquishment  of  the  goal  of  conver- 
sion. We  are  preaching  to  educate,  not  to  save;  to  in- 
struct, not  to  transform.  Conversion  may  be  gradual  and 
half-unconscious,  a  long  and  normal  process  under  favor- 
able inheritance  and  with  the  culture  of  a  Christian  en- 
vironment. Or  it  may  be  sudden  and  catastrophic,  a  vio- 
lent change  of  emotional  and  volitional  activity.  When  a 
man  whose  feeling  has  been  repressed  by  sin  and  crusted 
over  by  deception,  whose  inner  restlessness  has  been  ac- 
cumulating under  the  misery  and  impotence  of  a  divided 

65 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

life,  is  brought  into  contact  with  Christian  truth,  he  can 
only  accept  it  through  a  volitional  crisis,  with  its  cleans- 
ing flood  of  penitence  and  confession  and  its  blessed  re- 
ward of  the  sense  of  pardon  and  peace  and  the  relinquish- 
ment  of  the  self  into  the  divine  hands.  But  one  thing  is 
true  of  either  process  in  the  Christian  doctrine  of  con- 
version. It  is  not  merely  an  achievement,  although  it  is 
that;  it  is  also  a  rescue.  It  cannot  come  about  without 
faith,  the  "will  to  believe" ;  neither  can  it  come  about  by 
that  alone.  Conversion  is  something  we  do;  it  is  also 
something  else,  working  within  us,  if  we  will  let  it,  help- 
ing us  to  do ;  hence  it  is  something  done  for  us. 

Now,  this  experience  of  conversion  is  passing  out  of 
Christian  life  and  preaching  under  humanistic  influence. 
We  are  accepting  the  Socratic  dictum  that  knowledge  is 
virtue.  Hence  we  blur  the  distinction  between  the  Chris- 
tian and  the  non-Christian.  Education  supplants  salvation. 
We  bring  the  boys  and  girls  into  the  church  because 
they  are  safer  there  than  outside  it ;  and  on  the  whole  it 
is  a  good  thing  to  do  and  really  they  belong  there  any- 
way. The  church  member  is  a  man  of  the  world,  softened 
by  Christian  feeling.  He  is  a  kindly  and  amiable  citizen 
and  an  honorable  man;  he  has  not  been  saved.  But  he 
knows  the  unwisdom  of  evil;  if  you  know  what  is  right 
you  will  do  it.  Intelligence  needs  no  support  from  grace. 
It  is  strange  that  the  church  does  not  see  that  with  this 
relinquishment  of  her  insistence  upon  something  that  re- 
ligion can  do  for  a  man  that  nothing  else  can  attempt, 
she  has  thereby  given  up  her  real  excuse  for  being, 
and  that  her  peculiar  and  distinctive  mission  has  gone. 
It  is  strange  that  she  does  not  see  that  the  humanism 
which,  since  it  is  at  home  in  the  world,  can  sometimes 
make  there  a  classic  hero,  degenerates  dreadfully  and  be- 

66 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

comes  unreal  in  a  church  where  unskilled  hands  use  it  to 
make  it  a  substitute  for  a  Christian  saint!  But  for  how 
many  efficient  parish  administrators,  Y.  M.  C.  A.  secre- 
taries, up-to-date  preachers,  character  is  conceived  of  as 
coming  not  by  discipline  but  by  expansion,  not  by  salva- 
tion, but  by  activity.  Social  service  solves  everything 
without  any  reference  to  the  troublesome  fact  that  the 
value  of  the  service  will  depend  upon  the  quality  of  the 
servant.  Salvation  is  a  combination  of  intelligence  and 
machinery.  Sin  is  pure  ignorance  or  just  maladjustment 
to  environment.  All  we  need  is  to  know  what  is  right  and 
wrong ;  the  humane  sciences  will  take  care  of  that ;  and, 
then,  have  an  advertising  agent,  a  gymnasium,  a  commit- 
tee on  spiritual  resources,  a  program,  a  conference,  a 
drive  for  money,  and  behold,  the  Kingdom  of  God  is 
among  us ! 

Fourth,  and  most  significant :  it  is  to  the  humanistic 
impulse  and  its  derived  philosophies  that  we  owe  the  in- 
dividualistic ethics,  the  relative  absence  of  the  sense  of 
moral  responsibility  for  the  social  order  which  has,  from 
the  beginning,  maimed  and  distorted  Protestant  Chris- 
tianity. It  was,  perhaps,  a  consequence  of  the  speculative 
and  absolute  philosophies  of  the  mediaeval  church  that, 
since  they  endeavored  to  relate  religion  to  the  whole  of 
the  cosmos,  its  remotest  and  ultimate  issues,  so  they  con- 
ceived of  its  absoluteness  as  concerned  with  the  whole 
of  human  experience,  with  every  relation  of  organized 
society.  Under  their  regulative  ideas  all  human  beings, 
not  a  selected  number,  had,  not  in  themselves  but  be- 
cause of  the  Divine  Sacrifice,  divine  significance ;  rever- 
ence was  had,  not  for  supermen  or  captains  of  industry, 
but  for  every  one  of  those  for  whom  Christ  died.  There 
were  no  human  institutions  which  were  ends  in  them- 

67 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

selves  or  more  important  than  the  men  which  created  and 
served  them.  The  Holy  Catholic  Church  was  the  only  in- 
stitution which  was  so  conceived ;  all  others,  social,  polit- 
ical, economic,  were  means  toward  the  end  of  the  preser- 
vation and  expression  of  human  personality.  Hence,  the 
interest  of  the  mediaeval  church  in  social  ethics  and  cor- 
porate values;  hence,  the  axiom  of  the  church's  control 
of,  the  believers'  responsibility  for,  the  economic  rela- 
tions of  society.  An  unjust  distribution  of  goods,  the  with- 
holding from  the  producer  of  his  fair  share  of  the  wealth 
which  he  creates,  profiteering,  predatory  riches — these 
were  ranked  under  one  term  as  avarice,  and  they  were 
counted  not  among  the  venial  offenses,  like  aberrations 
of  the  flesh,  but  avarice  was  considered  one  of  the  seven 
deadly  sins  of  the  spirit.  The  application  of  the  ethics  of 
Jesus  to  social  control  began  to  die  out  as  humanism  in- 
dividualized Christian  morals  and  as,  under  its  influence, 
nationalism  tended  to  supplant  the  international  ecclesi- 
astical order.  The  cynical  and  sordid  maxim  that  business 
is  business;  that,  in  the  economic  sphere,  the  standards 
of  the  church  are  not  operative  and  the  responsibility  of 
the  church  is  not  recognized — notions  which  are  a  chief 
heresy  and  an  outstanding  disgrace  of  nineteenth-century 
religion,  from  which  we  are  only  now  painfully  and 
slowly  reacting — these  may  be  traced  back  to  the  influ- 
ence of  humanism  upon  Christian  thought  and  conduct. 
In  general,  then,  it  seems  to  me  abundantly  clear  that 
the  humanistic  movement  has  both  limited  and  secu- 
larized Christian  preaching.  It  dogmatically  ignores 
supersensuous  values ;  hence  it  has  rationalized  preach- 
ing ;  hence  it  has  made  provincial  its  intellectual  approach 
and  treatment,  narrowed  and  made  mechanical  its  con- 
tent. It  has  turned  preaching  away  from  speculative  to 

68 


CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

practical  themes.  It  was,  perhaps,  this  mental  and  spirit- 
ual decline  of  the  ministry  to  which  a  distinguished  edu- 
cator referred  when  he  told  a  body  of  Congregational 
preachers  that  their  sermons  were  marked  by  "intellec- 
tual frugality."  It  is  this  which  a  great  New  England 
theologian-preacher,  Dr.  Gordon,  means  when  he  says 
"an  indescribable  pettiness,  a  mean  kind  of  retail  trade 
has  taken  possession  of  the  preachers ;  they  have  substi- 
tuted the  mill-round  for  the  sun-path." 

The  whole  world  today  tends  toward  a  monstrous  ego- 
tism. Man's  attention  is  centered  on  himself,  his  temporal 
salvation,  his  external  prosperity.  Preaching,  yielding 
partly  to  the  intellectual  and  partly  to  the  practical  en- 
vironment, has  tended  to  adopt  the  same  secular  scale 
of  values,  somewhat  pietized  and  intensified,  and  to  move 
within  the  same  area  of  operation.  That  is  why  most 
preaching  today  deals  with  relations  of  men  with 
men,  not  of  men  with  God.  Yet  human  relationships  can 
only  be  determined  in  the  light  of  ultimate  ones.  Most 
preaching  instinctively  avoids  the  definitely  religious 
themes;  deals  with  the  ethical  aspects  of  devotion;  with 
conduct  rather  than  with  worship;  with  the  effects,  not 
the  causes,  the  expression,  not  the  essence  of  the  religious 
life.  Most  college  preaching  chiefly  amounts  to  informal 
talks  on  conduct ;  somewhat  idealized  discussions  of  pub- 
lic questions ;  exhortations  to  social  service.  When  ser- 
mons do  deal  with  ultimate  sanctions  they  can  hardly  be 
called  Christian.  They  are  often  stoical;  self-control  is 
exalted  as  an  heroic  achievement,  as  being  self-authenti- 
cating, carrying  its  own  reward.  Or  they  are  utilitarian, 
giving  a  sentimentalized  or  frankly  shrewd  doctrine  of 
expediencies,  the  appeal  to  an  exaggerated  self-respect, 
enlightened  self-interest,  social  responsibility.  These  are 

69 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

typical  humanistic  values;  they  are  real  and  potent  and 
legitimate.  But  they  are  not  religious  and  they  do  not 
touch  religious  motives.  The  very  difference  between  the 
humanist  and  the  Christian  lies  here.  To  obey  a  principle 
is  moral  and  admirable ;  to  do  good  and  be  good  because 
it  pays  is  sensible;  but  to  act  from  love  of  a  person  is  a 
joyous  ecstasy,  a  liberation  of  power;  it  alone  transforms 
life  with  an  ultimate  and  enduring  goodness.  Genuine 
Christian  preaching  makes  its  final  appeal,  not  to  fear, 
not  to  hope,  not  to  future  rewards  and  punishments,  not 
to  reason  or  prudence  or  benevolence.  It  makes  its  appeal 
to  love,  and  that  means  that  it  calls  men  to  devotion  to 
a  living  Being,  a  Transcendence  beyond  and  without 
us.  For  you  cannot  love  a  principle,  or  relinquish  your- 
self to  an  idea.  You  must  love  another  living  Being. 
Which  amounts  to  saying  that  humanism  just  because 
it  is  self-contained  is  self-condemned.  It  minimizes  or 
ignores  the  living  God,  in  His  world,  but  not  to  be  iden- 
tified with  it ;  beyond  it  and  above  it ;  loving  it  because  it 
needs  to  be  loved;  blessing  it  because  saving  it.  In  so 
doing,  it  lays  the  axe  at  the  very  root  of  the  tree  of  reli- 
gion. Francis  Xavier,  in  his  greatest  of  all  hymns,  has 
stated  once  for  all  the  essence  of  the  Christian  motive 
and  the  religious  attitude : 

"  O  Deus,  ego  amo  te 
Nee  amo  te  ut  salves  me 
Aut  quia  non  amantes  te 
Aeternis  punis  igne. 

"  Nee  praemii  illius  spe 
Sed  sicut  tu  amasti  me 
Sic  amo  et  amabo  te 
Solem,  quia  Rex  meus  est." 

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CHILDREN  OF  ZION  AND  SONS  OF  GREECE 

What,  then,  has  been  the  final  effect  of  humanism 
upon  preaching?  It  has  tempted  the  preacher  to  deper- 
sonalize religion.  And  since  love  is  the  essence  of  per- 
sonality, it  has  thereby  stripped  preaching  of  the  emo- 
tional energy,  of  the  universal  human  interests  and  the 
prophetic  insight  which  only  love  can  bestow.  Over 
against  this  depersonalization,  we  must  find  some  way 
to  return  to  expressing  the  religious  view  and  utilizing 
the  religious  power  of  the  human  spirit. 


CHAPTER  THREE 
Eating,  Drinking  and  Being  Merry 

WE  ventured  to  say  in  the  preceding  chapter 
that,  under  the  influences  of  more  than  three 
centuries  of  humanism,  the  spiritual  solidar- 
ity of  mankind  is  breaking  down.  For  humanism  makes 
an  inhuman  demand  upon  the  will ;  it  minimizes  the  force 
of  the  subrational  and  it  largely  ignores  the  super- 
rational  elements  in  human  experience;  it  does  not 
answer  enough  questions.  Indeed,  it  is  frankly  con- 
fessed, particularly  by  students  of  the  political  and  eco- 
nomic forces  now  working  in  society,  that  the  new  free- 
dom born  in  the  Renaissance  is,  in  some  grave  sense,  a 
failure.  It  destroyed  what  had  been  the  common  moral 
authority  of  European  civilization  in  its  denial  of  the 
rule  of  the  church.  But  for  nearly  four  centuries  it  has 
become  increasingly  clear  that  it  offered  no  adequate 
substitute  for  the  supernatural  moral  and  religious  order 
which  it  supplanted.  John  Morley  was  certainly  one  of 
the  most  enlightened  and  humane  positivists  of  the  last 
generation.  In  his  Recollections,  published  three  years 
ago,  there  is  a  final  paragraph  which  runs  as  follows: 
"A  painful  interrogatory,  I  must  confess,  emerges.  Has 
not  your  school  held  the  civilized  world,  both  old  and 
new  alike,  in  the  hollow  of  their  hand  for  two  long  gener- 
ations past  ?  Is  it  quite  clear  that  their  influence  has  been 
so  much  more  potent  than  the  gospel  of  the  various 

72 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

churches?  Circumspice.  Is  not  diplomacy,  unkindly 
called  by  Voltaire  the  field  of  lies,  as  able  as  ever  it  was 
to  dupe  governments  and  governed  by  grand  abstract 
catchwords  veiling  obscure  and  inexplicable  purposes, 
and  turning  the  whole  world  over  with  blood  and  tears, 
to  a  strange  Witch's  Sabbath?"1  This  is  his  conclusion 
of  the  whole  matter. 

But  while  the  reasons  for  the  failure  are  not  far  to 
seek,  it  is  worth  while  for  the  preacher  to  dwell  on  them 
for  a  moment.  In  strongly  centered  souls  like  a  Morley 
or  an  Erasmus,  humanism  produces  a  stoical  endurance 
and  a  sublime  self-confidence.  But  it  tends,  in  lesser 
spirits,  to  a  restless  arrogance.  Hence,  both  those  lower 
elements  in  human  nature,  the  nature  and  extent  of 
whose  force  it  either  cloaks  or  minimizes,  and  those  im- 
ponderable and  supersensuous  values  which  it  tends  to 
ignore  and  which  are  not  ordinarily  included  in  its  defini- 
tion of  experience,  return  to  vex  and  plague  it.  Indeed 
the  worst  foe  of  humanism  has  never  been  the  religious 
view  of  the  world  upon  whose  stored-up  moral  reserves 
of  uncompromising  doctrine  it  has  often  half -consciously 
subsisted.  Humanism  has  long  profited  from  the  admitted 
truth  that  the  moral  restraints  of  an  age  that  possesses 
an  authoritative  and  absolute  belief  survive  for  some 
time  after  the  doctrine  itself  has  been  rejected.  What 
has  revealed  the  incompleteness  of  the  humanistic  posi- 
tion has  been  its  constant  tendency  to  decline  into  nat- 
uralism; a  tendency  markedly  accelerated  today.  Hence, 
we  find  ourselves  in  a  disintegrating  and  distracted  epoch. 
In  1912  Rudolph  Eucken  wrote:  "The  moral  solidarity 
of  mankind  is  dissolved.  Sects  and  parties  are  increas- 
ing; common  estimates  and  ideals  keep  slipping  away 

1  Recollections:  II,  p.  366  ff. 

73 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

from  us ;  we  understand  one  another  less  and  less.  Even 
voluntary  associations,  that  form  of  unity  peculiar  to 
modern  times,  unite  more  in  achievement  than  in  disposi- 
tion, bring  men  together  outwardly  rather  than  inwardly. 
The  danger  is  imminent  that  the  end  may  be  bellum 
omnium  contra  omnes,  a  war  of  all  against  all."1 

That  disintegration  is  sufficiently  advanced  so  that  we 
can  see  the  direction  it  is  taking  and  the  principle  that 
inspires  it.  Humanism  has  at  least  the  value  of  an  ob- 
jective standard  in  the  sense  that  it  sets  up  criteria  which 
are  without  the  individual ;  it  substitutes  a  collective  sub- 
jectivism, if  we  may  use  the  term,  for  personal  whim 
and  impulse.  Thus  it  proclaims  a  classic  standard  of 
moderation  in  all  things,  the  golden  mean  of  the  Greeks, 
Confucius'  and  Gautama's  law  of  measure.  It  proposes 
to  bring  the  primitive  and  sensual  element  in  man  under 
critical  control ;  to  accomplish  this  it  relies  chiefly  upon 
its  amiable  exaggeration  of  the  reasonableness  of  human 
nature.  But  the  Socratic  dictum  that  knowledge  is  virtue 
was  the  product  of  a  personality  distinguished,  if  we  ac- 
cept the  dialogues  of  Plato,  by  a  perfect  harmony  of 
thought  and  feeling.  Probably  it  is  not  wise  to  build  so 
important  a  rule  upon  so  distinguished  an  exception ! 

But  the  positive  defect  of  humanism  is  more  serious. 
It  likewise  proposes  to  rationalize  those  supersensuous 
needs  and  convictions  which  lie  in  the  imaginative,  the 
intuitive  ranges  of  experience.  The  very  proposal  carries 
a  denial  of  their  value-in-themselves.  Its  inevitable  result 
in  the  humanist  is  their  virtual  ignoring.  The  greatest  of 
all  the  humanists  of  the  Orient  was  Confucius.  "I  ven- 
ture to  ask  about  death,"  said  a  disciple  to  the  sage. 
"While  you  do  not  know  life,"  replied  he,  "how  can  you 

1  Harvard  Theo.  Rev.,  vol.  V,  no.  3,  p.  277. 

74 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

know  about  death?"1  Even  more  typical  of  the  human- 
istic attitude  towards  the  distinctively  religious  elements 
of  experience  are  other  sayings  of  Confucius,  such  as: 
"To  give  oneself  earnestly  to  the  duties  due  to  men,  and 
while  respecting  spiritual  beings,  to  keep  aloof  from  them 
may  be  called  wisdom."1  The  precise  area  of  humanistic 
interests  is  indicated  in  another  observation.  "The  sub- 
jects on  which  the  Master  did  not  talk  were  .  .  .  disorder 
and  spiritual  beings."1  For  the  very  elements  of  experi- 
ence which  humanism  belittles  or  avoids  are  found  in  the 
world  where  pagans  like  Rabelais  robustly  jest  or  the 
high  spaces  where  souls  like  Newman  meditate  and  pray. 
The  humanist  appears  to  be  frightened  by  the  one  and  re- 
pelled by  the  other;  will  not  or  cannot  see  life  steadily 
and  whole.  That  a  powerful  primitivistic  faith,  like  Tao- 
ism, a  sort  of  religious  bohemianism,  should  flourish  be- 
side such  pragmatic  and  passionless  moderation  as  classic 
Confucianism  is  inevitable ;  that  the  worship  of  Amida 
Buddha,  the  Buddha  of  redemption  and  a  future  heaven, 
of  a  positive  and  eternal  bliss,  should  be  the  Chinese 
form  of  the  Indian  faith  is  equally  intelligible.  After  a 
like  manner  it  is  the  humanism  of  our  Protestant  preach- 
ing today  from  which  men  are  defecting  into  utter 
worldliness  and  indifference  on  the  one  hand  and  return- 
ing to  mediaeval  and  Catholic  forms  of  supernaturalism 
on  the  other. 

For  the  primitive  in  man  is  a  beast  whom  it  is  hard 
to  chain  nor  does  humanism  with  its  semi-scientific,  semi- 
sentimental  laudation  of  all  natural  values  produce  that 
exacting  mood  of  inward  scrutiny  in  which  self-control 
has  most  chance  of  succeeding.  Hence  here,  as  elsewhere 
on  the  continent,  and  formerly  in  China,  in  Greece  and 

i  Analects,  XI,  CXI ;  VI,  CXX. 

75 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

in  Rome,  a  sort  of  neo-paganism  has  been  steadily  sup- 
planting it. 

To  the  study  of  this  neo-paganism  we  now  address  our- 
selves. It  is  the  third  and  lowest  of  those  levels  of  human 
experience  to  which  we  referred  in  the  first  lecture.  The 
naturalist,  you  may  remember,  is  that  incorrigible  indi- 
vidual who  imagines  that  he  is  a  law  unto  himself,  that 
he  may  erect  his  person  into  a  sovereign  over  the  whole 
universe.  He  perversely  identifies  discipline  with  repres- 
sion and  makes  the  unlimited  the  goal  both  of  imagination 
and  conduct.  Oscar  Wilde's  epigrams,  and  more  particu- 
larly his  fables,  are  examples  of  a  thoroughgoing  natural- 
ist's insolent  indifference  to  any  form  of  restraint.  All 
things,  whether  holy  or  bestial,  were  material  for  his 
topsy-turvy  wit,  his  literally  unbridled  imagination.  No 
humanistic  law  of  decency,  that  is  to  say,  a  proper  re- 
spect for  the  opinions  of  mankind,  and  no  divine  law  of 
reverence  and  humility,  acted  for  him  as  a  restraining 
force  or  a  selective  principle.  An  immediate  and  signifi- 
cant example  of  this  naturalistic  riot  of  feeling,  with  its 
consequent  false  and  anarchic  scale  of  values,  is  found  in 
the  film  dramas  of  the  moving  picture  houses.  Unreal  ex- 
travagance of  imagination,  accompanied  by  the  debauch 
of  the  aesthetic  and  moral  judgment,  frequently  distin- 
guishes them.  In  screenland,  it  is  the  vampire,  the  villain, 
the  superman,  the  saccharine  angel  child,  who  reign  al- 
most undisputed.  Noble  convicts,  virtuous  courtesans,  at- 
tractive murderers,  good  bad  men,  and  ridiculous  good 
men,  flit  across  the  canvas  haloed  with  cheap  sentimental- 
ity. Opposed  to  them,  in  an  ever  losing  struggle,  are  those 
conventional  figures  who  stand  for  the  sober  realities  of 
an  orderly  and  disciplined  world ;  the  judge,  the  police- 
man, the  mere  husband.  These  pitiable  and  laughable  fig- 

76 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

ures  are  always  outwitted ;  they  receive  the  fate  which  in- 
deed, in  any  primitive  society,  they  so  richly  deserve ! 

How  deeply  sunk  in  the  modern  world  are  the  roots  of 
this  naturalism  is  shown  by  its  long  course  in  history, 
paralleling  humanism.  It  has  seeped  down  through  the 
Protestant  centuries  in  two  streams.  One  is  a  sort  of 
scientific  naturalism.  It  exalts  material  phenomena  and 
the  external  order,  issues  in  a  glorification  of  elemental 
impulses,  an  attempted  return  to  childlike  spontaneous 
living,  the  identifying  of  man's  values  with  those  of  prim- 
itive nature.  The  other  is  an  emotional  naturalism,  of 
which  Maeterlinck  is  at  the  moment  a  brilliant  and  lam- 
entable example.  This  exchanges  the  world  of  sober 
conduct,  intelligible  and  straightforward  thinking  for  an 
unfettered  dreamland,  compounded  of  fairy  beauty, 
flashes  of  mystical  and  intuitive  understanding  inter- 
mixed with  claptrap  magic,  a  high-flown  commercialism 
and  an  etherealized  sensuality. 

Rousseau  represents  both  these  streams  in  his  own  per- 
son. His  sentimentalized  egotism  and  bland  sensuality 
pass  belief.  His  sensitive  spirit  dissolves  in  tears  over  the 
death  of  his  dog  but  he  bravely  consigns  his  illegitimate 
children  to  the  foundling  asylum  without  one  tremor.  In 
his  justly  famous  and  justly  infamous  Confessions,  he 
presents  himself  Satan- wise  before  the  Almighty  at  the 
last  Judgment,  these  Confessions  in  his  hand,  a  challenge 
to  the  remainder  of  the  human  race  upon  his  lips.  "Let 
a  single  one  assert  to  Thee,  if  he  dare :  I  am  better  than 
that  man."  But  his  preachment  of  natural  and  sponta- 
neous values,  return  to  primitive  conditions,  was  equally 
-aggressive.  If  anyone  wants  to  inspect  the  pit  whence  the 
Montessori  system  of  education  was  digged,  let  him  read 
Rousseau,  who  declared  that  the  only  habit  a  child 

77 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

should  have  is  the  habit  of  not  having  a  habit,  or  his  con- 
temporary disciple,  George  Moore,  who  says  that  one 
should  be  ashamed  of  nothing  except  of  being  ashamed. 
There  are  admirable  features  in  the  schooling-made-easy 
system.  It  recognizes  the  fitness  of  different  minds  for 
different  work;  that  the  process  of  education  need  not 
and  should  not  be  forbidding;  that  natural  science  has 
been  subordinated  overmuch  to  the  humanities ;  that  the 
imagination  and  the  hand  should  be  trained  with  the  in- 
tellect. But  the  method  which  proposes  to  give  children 
an  education  along  the  lines  of  least  resistance  is,  like 
all  other  naturalism,  a  contradiction  in  terms,  sometimes 
a  reductio  ad  absurdum,  sometimes  ad  nauseam.  As  long 
ago  as  1893,  when  Huxley  wrote  his  Romanes  lecture  on 
Evolution  and  Ethics,  this  identity  of  natural  and  human 
values  was  explicitly  denied.  Teachers  do  not  exist  for 
the  amusement  of  children,  nor  for  the  repression  of  chil- 
dren ;  they  exist  for  the  discipline  of  children.  The  new 
education  is  consistently  primitivistic  in  the  latitude 
which  it  allows  to  whim  and  in  its  indulgence  of  indo- 
lence. There  is  only  one  way  to  make  a  man  out  of  a 
child ;  to  teach  him  that  happiness  is  a  by-product  of 
achievement ;  that  pleasure  is  an  accompaniment  of  labor ; 
that  the  foundation  of  self-respect  is  drudgery  well  done ; 
that  there  is  no  power  in  any  system  of  philosophy,  any 
view  of  the  world,  no  view  of  the  world,  which  can  re- 
lease him  from  the  unchanging  necessity  of  personal 
struggle,  personal  consecration,  personal  holiness  in  hu- 
man life.  "That  wherein  a  man  cannot  be  equaled,"  says 
Confucius,  "is  his  work  which  other  men  cannot  see."1 
The  humanist,  at  least,  does  not  blink  the  fact  that  we 
are  caught  in  a  serious  and  difficult  world.  To  rail  at  it, 
1  Doctrine  of  the  Mean,  ch.  xxxiii,  v.  2. 

78 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

to  deny  it,  to  run  hither  and  thither  like  scurrying  rats  to 
evade  it,  will  not  alter  one  jot  or  one  tittle  of  its  inexora- 
ble facts. 

Following  Rousseau  and  Chateaubriand  come  a  strik- 
ing group  of  Frenchmen  who  passed  on  this  torch  of  eth- 
ical and  aesthetic  rebellion.  Some  of  them  are  wildly  ro- 
mantic like  Dumas  and  Hugo;  some  of  them  perversely 
realistic  like  Balzac,  Flaubert,  Gautier,  Zola.  Paul  Ver- 
laine,  a  near  contemporary  of  ours,  is  of  this  first  num- 
ber; writer  of  some  of  the  most  exquisite  lyrics  in  the 
French  language,  yet  a  man  who  floated  all  his  life  in 
typical  romantic  fashion  from  passion  to  repentance, 
"passing  from  lust  of  the  flesh  to  sorrow  for  sin  in  per- 
petual alternation."  Guy  de  Maupassant  again  is  a  nat- 
uralist of  the  second  sort,  a  brutal  realist ;  de  Maupassant, 
who  died  a  suicide,  crying  out  to  his  valet  from  his 
hacked  throat  "Encore  I'homme  au  rancart!" — another 
carcass  to  the  dustheap ! 

In  English  letters  Wordsworth  in  his  earlier  verse  il- 
lustrated the  same  sentimental  primitivism.  It  would  be 
unfair  to  quote  Peter  Bell,  for  that  is  Wordsworth  at  his 
dreadful  worst,  but  even  in  Tintern  Abbey,  which  has 
passages  of  incomparable  majesty  and  beauty,  there  are 
lines  in  which  he  declares  himself : 

"...  well  pleased  to  recognize 
In  nature,  and  the  language  of  the  sense 
The  anchor  of  my  purest  thought,  the  nurse, 
The  guide,  the  guardian  of  my  heart,  and  soul 
Of  all  my  moral  being." 

Byron's  innate  sophistication  saves  him  from  the  ludi- 
crous depths  to  which  Wordsworth  sometimes  fell,  but 
he,  too,  is  Rousseau's  disciple,  a  moral  rebel,  a  highly 

79 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

personal  and  subjective  poet  of  whom  Goethe  said  that 
he  respected  no  law,  human  or  divine,  except  that  of  the 
three  unities.  Byron's  verse  is  fascinating;  it  overflows 
with  a  sort  of  desperate  and  fiery  sincerity;  but,  as  he 
himself  says,  his  life  was  one  long  strife  of  "passion  with 
eternal  law."  He  combines  both  the  romantic  and  the 
realistic  elements  of  naturalism,  both  flames  with  ele- 
mental passion  and  parades  his  cynicism,  is  forever 
snapping  his  mood  in  Don  Juan,  alternating  extravagant 
and  romantic  feeling  with  lines  of  sardonic  and  purposely 
prosaic  realism.  Shelley  is  a  naturalist,  too,  not  in  the 
realm  of  sordid  values  but  of  Arcadian  fancy.  The  pre- 
Raphaelites  belong  here,  together  with  a  group  of  young 
Englishmen  who  flourished  between  1890  and  1914,  of 
whom  John  Davidson  and  Richard  Middleton,  both  sui- 
cides, are  striking  examples.  Poor  Middleton  turned 
from  naturalism  to  religion  at  the  last.  When  he  had  re- 
solved on  death,  he  wrote  a  message  telling  what  he  was 
about  to  do,  parting  from  his  friend  with  brave  assump- 
tion of  serenity.  But  he  did  not  send  the  postcard,  and 
in  the  last  hour  of  that  hired  bedroom  in  Brussels, 
with  the  bottle  of  chloroform  before  him,  he  traced  across 
the  card's  surface  "a  broken  and  a  contrite  spirit  thou 
wilt  not  despise."  So  there  was  humility  at  the  last.  One 
remembers  rather  grimly  what  the  clown  says  in  Twelfth 
Night, 

"Pleasure  will  be  paid  some  time  or  other." 

This  same  revolt  against  the  decencies  and  conventions 
of  our  humanist  civilization  occupies  a  great  part  of  pres- 
ent literature.  How  far  removed  from  the  clean  and  virile 
stoicism  of  George  Meredith  or  the  honest  pessimism  of 
Thomas  Hardy  is  Arnold  Bennett's  The  Pretty  Lady  or 

80 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

Galsworthy's  The  Dark  Flower.  Finally,  in  this  country 
we  need  only  mention,  if  we  may  descend  so  far,  such 
naturalists  in  literature  as  Jack  London,  Robert  Cham- 
bers and  Gouverneur  Morris.  One's  only  excuse  for  re- 
ferring to  them  is  that  they  are  vastly  popular  with  the 
people  whom  you  and  I  try  to  interest  in  sermons,  to 
whom  we  talk  on  religion ! 

Of  course,  this  naturalism  in  letters  has  its  accom- 
panying and  interdependent  philosophic  theory,  its  intel- 
lectual interpretation  and  defense.  As  Kant  is  the  noblest 
of  the  moralists,  so  I  suppose  William  James  and,  still 
later,  Henri  Bergson  and  Croce  are  the  chief  protagonists 
of  unrestrained  feeling  and  naturalistic  values  in  the 
world  of  thought.  To  the  neo-realists  "the  thing  given"  is 
alone  reality.  James' pragmatism  frankly  relinquishes  any 
absolute  standard  in  favor  of  relativity.  In  the  Varieties  of 
Religious  Experience,  which  Professor  Babbitt  tells  us 
someone  in  Cambridge  suggested  should  have  had  for  a 
subtitle  "Wild  Religions  I  Have  Known,"  he  is  plainly 
more  interested  in  the  intensity  than  in  the  normality,  in 
the  excesses  than  in  the  essence  of  the  religious  life.  In- 
deed, Professor  Babbitt  quotes  him  as  saying  in  a  letter 
to  Charles  Eliot  Norton,  "mere  sanity  is  the  most  Philis- 
tine and  at  the  bottom  most  unessential  of  a  man's  attri- 
butes."1 In  the  same  way  Bergson,  consistently  anti- 
Socratic  and  discrediting  analytical  intellect,  insists  that 
whatever  unity  may  be  had  must  come  through  instinct, 
not  analysis.  He  refuses  to  recognize  Plato's  One  in  the 
Many,  sees  the  whole  universe  as  "a  perpetual  gushing 
forth  of  novelties,"  a  universal  and  meaningless  flux. 
Surrender  to  this  eternal  flux,  he  appears  to  say,  and 
then  we  shall  gain  reality.  So  he  relies  on  impulse,  in- 

1  Letter  to  C.  E.  Norton,  June  30,  1904. 

81 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

stinct,  his  elan  vital,  which  means,  I  take  it,  on  man's 
subrational  emotions.  We  call  it  Intuitionism,  but  such 
philosophy  in  plain  and  bitter  English  is  the  intellectual 
defense  and  solemn  glorification  of  impulse.  "Time," 
says  Bergson,  "is  a  continuous  stream,  a  present  that  en- 
dures."1 Time  apparently  is  all.  "Life  can  have  no  pur- 
pose in  the  human  sense  of  the  word."2  Essentially,  then, 
James,  Bergson  and  Croce  appeal  from  intellect  to  feel- 
ing. They  return  to  primitivism. 

Here  is  a  philosophy  which  obviously  may  be  both  as 
antihumanistic  and  as  irreligious  as  any  which  could  well 
be  conceived.  Here  is  license  in  conduct  and  romanticism 
in  expression  going  hand  in  hand  with  this  all  but  exclu- 
sive emphasis  upon  relativity  in  thought.  Here  is  disor- 
der, erected  as  a  universal  concept;  the  world  conceived 
of  as  a  vast  and  impenetrable  veil  which  is  hiding  noth- 
ing; an  intricacy  without  pattern.  Obviously  so  ungov- 
erned  and  fluid  a  universe  justifies  uncritical  and  ir- 
responsible thinking  and  living. 

We  have  tried  thus  to  sketch  that  declension  into  pa- 
ganism on  the  part  of  much  of  the  present  world,  of 
which  we  spoke  earlier  in  the  chapter.  It  denies  or  ignores 
the  humanistic  law  with  its  exacting  moral  and  aesthetic 
standards;  it  openly  flouts  the  attitude  of  obedience  and 
humility  before  religious  mandates,  and,  so  far  as  op- 
portunity offers  or  prudence  permits,  goes  its  own  inso- 
lently wanton  way.  Our  world  is  full  of  dilettanti  in  the 
colleges,  anarchists  in  the  state,  atheists  in  the  church, 
bohemians  in  art,  sybarites  in  conduct  and  ineffably  silly 
women  in  society,  who  have  felt,  and  occasionally  studied 
the  scientific  and  naturalistic  movement  just  far  enough 

1  Le  Perception  de  Changement,  30. 

2  L' evolution  creatrice,  55. 

82 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

and  superficially  enough  to  grasp  the  idea  of  relativity 
and  to  exalt  it  as  sufficient  and  complete  in  itself.  Many 
of  them  are  incapable  of  realizing  the  implications  for 
conduct  and  belief  which  it  entails.  Others  of  them,  who 
are  of  the  lesser  sort,  pulled  by  the  imperious  hungers  of 
the  flesh,  the  untutored  instincts  of  a  restless  spirit,  hat- 
ing Hellenic  discipline  no  less  than  Christian  renunciation, 
having  no  stomach  either  for  self-control  or  self-surren- 
der, look  out  on  the  mass  of  endlessly  opposing  complex- 
ities of  the  modern  world  and  gladly  use  that  vision  as 
an  excuse  for  abandoning  what  is  indeed  the  ever  failing 
but  also  the  ever  necessary  struggle  to  achieve  order, 
unity,  yes,  even  perfection. 

To  them,  therefore,  the  only  way  to  conquer  a  tempta- 
tion is  to  yield  to  it.  They  rail  nonsensically  at  all  repres- 
sion, forgetting  that  man  cannot  express  the  full  circle 
of  his  mutually  exclusive  instincts,  and  that  when  he 
gives  rein  to  one  he  thereby  negates  another ;  that  choice, 
therefore,  is  inevitable  and  that  the  more  exacting  and 
critical  the  choice,  the  more  valuable  and  comprehensive 
the  expression.  So  they  frankly  assert  their  choices  along 
the  lines  of  least  resistance  and  abandon  themselves,  at 
least  in  principle,  to  emotional  chaos  and  moral  senti- 
mentalism.  Very  often  they  are  of  all  men  the  most  metic- 
ulously mannered.  But  their  manners  are  not  the  decorum 
of  the  humanist,  they  are  the  etiquette  of  the  worldling. 
Chesterfield  had  these  folk  in  mind  when  he  spoke  with 
an  intolerable,  if  incisive,  cynicism  of  those  who  know 
the  art  of  combining  the  useful  appearances  of  virtue 
with  the  solid  satisfactions  of  vice. 

Such  naturalism  is  sometimes  tolerated  by  those  who 
aspire  to  urbane  and  liberal  judgments  because  they 
think  it  can  be  defended  on  humanistic  grounds.  But,  as 

83 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

a  matter  of  fact,  it  is  as  offensive  to  the  thoroughgoing 
humanist  as  it  is  to  the  sincere  religionist.  They  have  a 
common  quarrel  with  it.  Take,  for  example,  the  notori- 
ous naturalistic  doctrine  of  art  for  art's  sake,  the  defiant 
divorcing  of  ethical  and  aesthetic  values.  Civilization  no 
less  than  religion  must  fight  this.  For  it  is  as  false  in  ex- 
perience and  as  unclear  in  thinking  as  could  well  be  im- 
agined. Its  defense,  so  far  as  it  has  any,  is  based  upon  the 
confusion  in  the  pagan  mind  of  morality  with  moraliz- 
ing, a  confusion  that  no  good  humanist  would  ever  per- 
mit himself.  Of  course,  the  end  of  art  is  neither  preach- 
ing nor  teaching  but  delighting.  For  that  very  reason, 
however,  art,  too,  must  conform — hateful  word! — con- 
form to  fixed  standards.  For  the  sense  of  proportion, 
the  instinct  for  elimination,  is  integral  to  art  and  this,  as 
Professor  Babbitt  points  out,  is  attained  only  with  the 
aid  of  the  ethical  imagination.1  Because  without  the  ethi- 
cal restraint,  the  creative  spirit  roams  among  unbridled 
emotions;  art  becomes  impressionism.  What  it  then  pro- 
duces may  indeed  be  picturesque,  melodramatic,  sensual, 
but  it  will  not  be  beautiful  because  there  will  be  no  im- 
aginative wholeness  in  it.  In  other  words,  the  artist  who 
divorces  aesthetics  from  ethics  does  gain  creative  license, 
but  he  gains  it  at  the  expense  of  a  balanced  and  harmo- 
nious expression.  If  you  do  not  believe  it,  compare  the 
Venus  de  Milo  with  the  Venus  de  Medici  or  a  Rubens 
fleshy,  spilling-out-of-her-clothes  Magdalen  with  a  Dona- 
tello  Madonna.  When  ethical  restraint  disappears,  art 
tends  to  caricature,  it  becomes  depersonalized.  The  Ve- 
nus de  Milo  is  a  living  being,  a  great  personage ;  indeed, 
a  genuine  and  gracious  goddess.  The  Venus  de  Medici 
has  scarcely  any  personality  at  all;  she  is  chiefly  objecti- 
1  Rousseau  and  Romanticism,  p.  206. 

84 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

fied  desire !  The  essence  of  art  is  not  spontaneous  expres- 
sion nor  naked  passion ;  the  essence  of  art  is  critical  ex- 
pression, restrained  passion. 

Now,  such  extreme  naturalism  has  been  the  continu- 
ing peril  and  the  arch  foe  of  every  successive  civilization. 
It  is  the  "reversion  to  type"  of  the  scientist,  the  "natural 
depravity"  of  the  older  theology,  the  scoffing  devil,  with 
his  eternal  no!  in  Goethe's  Faust.  It  tends  to  accept 
all  powerful  impulses  as  thereby  justified,  all  vital 
and  novel  interests  as  ipso  facto  beautiful  and  good. 
Nothing  desirable  is  ugly  or  evil.  It  pays  no  attention,  ex- 
cept to  ridicule  them,  to  the  problems  that  vex  high  and 
serious  souls:  What  is  right  and  wrong?  What  is  ugly 
and  beautiful?  What  is  holy  and  what  is  profane?  It 
either  refuses  to  admit  the  existence  of  these  questions  or 
else  asserts  that,  as  insoluble,  they  are  also  negligible 
problems.  To  all  such  stupid  moralizing  it  prefers  the 
click  of  the  castanets !  The  law,  then,  of  this  naturalism 
always  and  everywhere  is  the  law  of  rebellion,  of  ruthless 
self-assertion,  of  whim  and  impulse,  of  cunning  and  of 
might. 

You  may  wonder  why  we,  being  preachers,  have  spent 
so  much  time  talking  about  it.  Folk  of  this  sort  do  not 
ordinarily  flock  to  the  stenciled  walls  and  carpeted  floors 
of  our  comfortable,  middle-class  Protestant  meeting- 
houses. They  are  not  attracted  by  Tiffany  glass  windows, 
nor  the  vanilla-flavored  music  of  a  mixed  quartet,  nor  the 
oddly  assorted  "enrichments"  we  have  dovetailed  into  a 
once  puritan  order  of  worship.  That  is  true,  but  it  is  also 
true  that  these  are  they  who  need  the  Gospel ;  also  that 
these  folk  do  influence  the  time-current  that  enfolds  us 
and  pervades  the  very  air  we  breathe  and  that  they  and 
their  standards  are  profoundly  influencing  the  youth  of 

85 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

this  generation.  You  need  only  attend  a  few  college 
dances  to  be  sure  of  that !  One  of  the  sad  things  about  the 
Protestant  preacher  is  his  usual  willingness  to  move  in  a 
strictly  professional  society  and  activity,  his  lack  of  ex- 
tra-ecclesiastical interests,  hence  his  narrow  and  unskill- 
ful observations  and  perceptions  outside  his  own  parish 
and  his  own  field. 

Moreover,  there  are  other  forms  in  which  naturalism  is 
dominating  modern  society.  It  began,  like  all  movements, 
in  literature  and  philosophy  and  individual  bohemianism ; 
but  it  soon  worked  its  way  into  social  and  political  and 
economic  organizations.  Now,  when  we  are  dealing  with 
them  we  are  dealing  with  the  world  of  the  middle  class ; 
this  is  our  world.  And  here  we  find  naturalism  today  in 
its  most  brutal  and  entrenched  expressions.  Here  it  con- 
fronts every  preacher  on  the  middle  aisle  of  his  Sunday 
morning  congregation.  We  are  continually  forgetting  this 
because  it  is  a  common  fallacy  of  our  hard-headed  and 
prosperous  parishioners  to  suppose  that  the  vagaries  of 
philosophers  and  the  maunderings  of  poets  have  only  the 
slightest  practical  significance.  But  few  things  could  be 
further  from  the  truth.  It  is  abstract  thought  and  pure 
feeling  which  are  perpetually  moulding  the  life  of  office 
and  market  and  street.  It  has  sometimes  been  the  dire 
mistake  of  preaching  that  it  took  only  an  indifferent  and 
contemptuous  interest  in  such  contemporary  movements 
in  literature  and  art.  Its  attitude  toward  them  has  been 
determined  by  temperamental  indifference  to  their  ap- 
peal. It  forgets  the  significance  of  their  intellectual 
and  emotional  sources.  This  is,  then,  provincialism 
and  obtuseness  and  nowhere  are  they  by  their  very  nature 
more  indefensible  or  more  disastrous  than  in  the  preacher 
of  religion. 

86 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

Let  us  turn,  then,  to  those  organized  expressions  of  so- 
ciety where  our  own  civilization  is  strained  the  most, 
where  it  is  nearest  to  the  breaking  point,  namely,  to  our 
industrial  and  political  order.  Let  us  ask  ourselves  if  we 
do  not  find  this  naturalistic  philosophy  regnant  there. 
That  we  are  surrounded  by  widespread  industrial  revolt, 
that  we  see  obvious  political  decadence  on  the  one  hand, 
and  a  determination  to  experiment  with  fresh  govern- 
mental processes  on  the  other,  few  would  deny.  It  would 
appear  to  me  that  in  both  cases  the  revolt  and  the  deca- 
dence are  due  to  that  fierce,  short  creed  of  rebellion 
against  humane  no  less  than  religious  standards,  which 
has  more  and  more  governed  our  national  economic  sys- 
tems and  our  international  political  intercourse.  Let  me 
begin  with  business  and  industry  as  they  existed  before 
the  war.  I  paint  a  general  picture;  there  are  many  and 
notable  exceptions  to  it,  human  idealism  there  is  in  plenty, 
but  it  and  they  only  prove  the  rule.  And  as  I  paint  the  pic- 
ture, ask  yourselves  the  two  questions  which  should  in- 
terest us  as  preachers  regarding  it.  First,  by  which  of 
these  three  laws  of  human  development,  religious,  hu- 
manistic, naturalistic,  has  it  been  largely  governed?  Sec- 
ondly, by  what  law  are  men  now  attempting  to  solve  its 
present  difficulties? 

The  present  industrial  situation  is  the  product  of  two 
causes.  One  of  them  was  the  invention  of  machinery  and 
the  discovery  of  steam  transit.  These  multiplied  produc- 
tion. They  made  accessible  unexploited  sources  of  raw 
material  and  new  markets  for  finished  goods.  The  op- 
portunities for  lucrative  trading  and  the  profitableness  of 
overproduction  which  they  made  possible  became  almost 
immeasurable.  Before  these  discoveries  western  society 
was  generally  agricultural,  accompanied  by  cottage  in- 

87 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

dustries  and  guild  trades.  It  was  largely  made  up  of  di- 
rect contacts  and  controlled  by  local  interests.  After  them 
it  became  a  huge  industrial  empire  of  ramified  interna- 
tional relationships. 

The  second  factor  in  the  situation  was  the  intellectual 
and  spiritual  nature  of  the  society  which  these  inventions 
entered.  It  was,  as  we  have  seen,  essentially  humanistic. 
It  believed  much  in  the  natural  rights  of  man.  The  indi- 
vidual was  justified,  by  the  natural  order,  in  seeking  his 
separate  good.  If  he  only  sought  it  hard  enough  and  well 
enough  the  result  would  be  for  the  general  welfare  of  so- 
ciety. Thus  at  the  moment  when  mechanical  invention 
offered  unheard-of  opportunities  for  material  expansion 
and  lucrative  business,  the  thought  and  feeling  of  the 
community  pretty  generally  sanctioned  an  individualistic 
philosophy  of  life.  The  result  was  tragic  if  inevitable.  The 
new  industrial  order  offered  both  the  practical  incentive 
and  the  theoretical  justification  for  institutional  declen- 
sion from  humane  to  primitive  standards.  It  is  not  to  be 
supposed  that  men  slipped  deliberately  into  paganism; 
the  human  mind  is  not  so  sinister  as  it  is  stupid  nor  so 
cruel  as  it  is  unimaginative  nor  so  brutal  as  it  is  compla- 
cent. For  the  most  part  we  do  not  really  understand,  in  our 
daily  lives,  what  we  are  about.  Hence  society  degenerated, 
as  it  always  does,  in  the  confident  and  stubborn  belief  that 
it  was  improving  the  time  and  doing  God's  service.  But 
He  that  sitteth  in  the  heavens  must  have  laughed,  He 
must  have  had  us  in  derision! 

For  upon  what  law,  natural,  human,  divine,  has  this 
new  empire  been  founded?  That  it  has  produced  great 
humanists  is  gratefully  conceded ;  that  real  spiritual  prog- 
ress has  issued  from  its  incidental  cosmopolitanism  is 
manifest ;  but  which  way  has  it  fronted,  what  have  been 

88 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

its  characteristic  emphases  and  its  controlling  tendencies  ? 
Let  its  own  works  testify.  It  has  created  a  world  of  new 
and  extreme  inequality,  both  in  the  distribution  of  ma- 
terial, of  intellectual  and  of  spiritual  goods.  Here  is  a 
small  group  who  own  the  land,  the  houses,  the  factories, 
machinery  and  the  tools.  Here  is  a  very  large  group,  with- 
out houses,  without  tools,  without  land  or  goods.  At  this 
moment  only  7  per  cent  of  our  110,000,000  of  Ameri- 
can people  have  an  income  of  $3,000  or  more;  only 
1%  Per  cent  have  an  income  of  $5,000  or  more!  What 
law  produced  and  justifies  such  a  society?  The  unwritten 
law  of  heaven?  No.  The  law  of  humanism,  of  Confucius 
and  Buddha  and  Epictetus  and  Aurelius?  No.  The  law 
of  naked  individualism;  of  might;  force;  cunning?  Yes. 

Here  in  our  American  cities  are  the  overwealthy  and 
the  insolently  worldly  people.  They  have  their  palatial 
town  house,  their  broad  inland  acres ;  some  of  them  have 
their  seaside  homes,  their  fish  and  game  preserves  as  well. 
Here  in  our  American  cities  are  the  alien,  the  ignorant, 
the  helpless,  crowded  into  unclean  and  indecent  tene- 
ments, sometimes  1,000  human  beings  to  the  acre.  What 
justifies  a  pseudo-civilization  which  permits  such  tragic 
inequality  of  fortune?  Inequality  of  endowment?  No. 
First,  because  there  is  no  natural  inequality  so  extreme 
as  that ;  secondly,  because  no  one  would  dare  assert  that 
these  cleavages  in  the  industrial  state  even  remotely  par- 
allel the  corresponding  cleavages  in  the  distribution  of 
ability  among  mankind.  What  justifies  it,  then?  The  un- 
written law  of  heaven?  No.  The  law  of  humanism?  No. 
The  law  of  the  jungle?  Yes. 

Now  for  our  second  question.  By  what  law,  admitting 
many  exceptions,  are  men  on  the  whole  trying  to  change 
this  situation  at  once  indecent  and  impious  ?  This  is  a  yet 

89 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

more  important  query.  Our  world  has  obviously  awak- 
ened to  the  rottenness  in  Denmark.  But  where  are  we 
turning  for  our  remedy?  Is  it  to  the  penitence  and  con- 
fession, the  public-mindedness,  the  identification  of  the 
fate  of  the  individual  with  the  fate  of  the  whole  group 
which  is  the  religious  impulse  ?  Is  it  to  a  disinterested  and 
even-handed  justice,  the  high  legalism  of  the  Golden 
Rule,  which  would  be  the  humanist's  way  ?  Or  is  it  to  the 
old  law  of  aggression  and  might  transferring  the  gain 
thereof  from  the  present  exploiters  to  the  recently  ex- 
ploited ? 

It  would  appear  to  be  generally  true  that  society  at  this 
moment  is  not  chiefly  concerned  with  either  love  or  jus- 
tice, renunciation  or  discipline,  not  with  the  supplanting  of 
the  old  order,  but  with  perpetuating  the  naturalistic  prin- 
ciple by  means  of  a  partial  redivision  of  the  spoils,  a  series 
of  compromises,  designed  to  make  it  more  tolerable  for 
one  class  of  its  former  victims.  Thus  in  capital  we  have 
the  autocratic  corporation,  atoning  for  past  outrages  on 
humanity  by  a  well-advertised  benevolent  paternalism, 
calculated  to  make  men  comfortable  so  that  they  may  not 
struggle  to  be  free,  or  by  huge  gifts  to  education,  to  phi- 
lanthropy, to  religion.  In  labor  we  see  men  rising  in  brute 
fury  against  both  employer  and  society.  They  deny  the 
basic  necessities  of  life  to  their  fellow  citizens ;  they  bring 
the  bludgeon  of  the  picket  down  upon  the  head  of  the 
scab ;  by  means  of  the  closed  shop  they  refuse  the  right  to 
work  to  their  brother  craftsmen ;  they  level  the  incapable 
men  up  and  the  capable  men  down  by  insisting  upon  uni- 
formity of  production  and  wage.  Thus  they  replace  the 
artificial  inequality  of  the  aristocrat  with  the  artificial 
equality  of  the  proletariat,  striving  to  organize  a  new  tyr- 
anny for  the  old.  It  is  significant  that  our  society  believes 

90 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

that  this  is  the  only  way  by  which  it  can  gain  its  rights. 
That  betrays  our  real  infidelity.  For  between  the  two,  as- 
sociated capital  and  associated  labor,  what  is  there  to 
choose  today  ?  By  what  law,  depending  upon  what  sort  of 
power,  is  each  seeking  its  respective  ends?  By  the  un- 
written law  of  heaven  ?  No.  By  the  humane  law,  some  ob- 
jective standard  of  common  rights  and  inclusive  justice? 
No !  By  the  ancient  law  that  the  only  effectual  appeal  is  to 
might  and  that  opportunity  therefore  justifies  the  deed? 
On  the  whole  it  is  to  this  question  that  we  must  answer, 
yes! 

Turn  away  now  from  national  economics  and  industry 
to  international  politics.  Does  not  its  real  politik  make  the 
philosophical  naturalism  of  Spencer  and  Haeckel  seem 
like  child's  play?  For  long  there  has  been  one  code  of 
ethics  for  the  peaceful  penetration  of  commercially  desir- 
able lands,  for  punitive  expeditions  against  peoples  pos- 
sessed of  raw  materials,  for  international  banking  and  fi- 
nance and  diplomatic  intercourse,  and  another  code  for 
private  honor  and  personal  morality.  There  has  been  one 
moral  scale  of  values  for  the  father  of  his  family  and 
another  for  the  same  man  as  ward  or  state  or  federal 
politician ;  one  code  to  govern  internal  disputes  within 
the  nation ;  another  code  to  govern  external  disputes  be- 
tween nations.  And  what  is  this  code  that  produced  the 
Prussian  autocracy,  that  long  insisted  on  the  opium  trade 
between  India  and  China,  that  permitted  the  atrocities  in 
the  Belgian  Congo,  that  sent  first  Russia  and  then  Japan 
into  Port  Arthur  and  first  Germany  and  then  Japan  into 
Shantung,  that  insists  upon  retaining  the  Turk  in  Con- 
stantinople, that  produced  the  already  discredited  treaty 
of  Versailles?  What  is  the  code  that  made  the  deadly 
rivalry  of  mounting  armaments  between  army  and  army, 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

navy  and  navy,  of  the  Europe  before  1914?  The  code,  to 
be  sure,  of  cunning,  of  greed,  of  might ;  the  materialism 
of  the  philosopher  and  the  naturalism  of  the  sensualist, 
clothed  in  grandiose  forms  and  covered  with  the  insuffer- 
able hypocrisy  of  solemn  phrases.  There  are  no  conceiva- 
ble ethical  or  religious  interests  and  no  humane  goals  or 
values  that  justify  these  things.  International  diplomacy 
and  politics,  economic  imperialism,  using  political  ma- 
chinery and  power  to  half-cloak,  half-champion  its  ends, 
has  no  law  of  Christian  sacrifice  and  no  law  of  Greek 
moderation  behind  it.  On  the  contrary,  what  should  in- 
terest the  Christian  preacher,  as  he  regards  it,  is  its  sheer 
anarchy,  its  unashamed  and  naked  paganism.  Its  law  is 
that  of  the  unscrupulous  and  the  daring,  not  that  of  the 
compassionate  or  the  just.  In  what  does  scientific  and 
emotional  naturalism  issue,  then?  In  this ;  a  man,  if  he  be 
a  man,  will  stand  above  divine  or  human  law  and  make 
it  operative  only  for  the  weaklings  beneath.  Wherever 
opportunity  offers  he  will  consult  his  own  will  and  grat- 
ify it  to  the  full.  To  have,  to  get,  to  buy,  to  sell,  to  ex- 
ploit the  world  for  power,  to  exploit  one's  self  for  pleas- 
ure, this  is  to  live.  The  only  law  is  the  old  primitive 
snarl;  each  man  for  himself,  let  the  devil  take  the  hind- 
most. 

There  is  only  one  end  to  such  naturalism  and  that  is 
increasing  anarchy.  It  means  my  will  against  your  will; 
my  appetite  for  gold,  for  land,  for  women,  for  luxury 
and  beauty  against  your  appetite;  until  at  length  it  cul- 
minates in  the  open  madness  of  physical  violence,  physi- 
cal destruction,  physical  death  and  despair.  There  can  be 
no  other  end  to  it.  If  men  dare  not  risk  being  the  lovers 
of  their  kind,  then  they  must  choose  between  being  the 
slaves  of  duty  or  the  slaves  of  force.  What  are  we  read- 

92 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

ing  in  the  public  prints  and  hearing  from  platform  and 
stage  ?  The  unending  wail  for  "rights" ;  the  assertion  of 
the  individual.  Ceased  is  the  chant  of  duty,  forgotten  the 
sacrifice  of  love! 

The  events  which  have  transformed  the  world  since 
1914  are  an  awful  commentary  upon  such  naturalism 
and  a  dreadful  confirmation  of  our  indictment.  Before 
the  spectacle  that  many  of  us  saw  on  those  sodden  fields 
of  Flanders,  both  humanist  and  religionist  should  be  alike 
aghast.  How  childish  not  to  perceive  that  its  causes,  as 
distinguished  from  its  occasions,  were  common  to  our 
whole  civilization.  How  perverse  not  to  confess  that  be- 
neath all  our  modern  life,  as  its  dominating  motive,  has 
lain  that  ruthless  and  pagan  philosophy,  which  creates 
alike  the  sybarite,  the  tyrant  and  the  anarch ;  the  philoso- 
phy in  which  lust  goes  hand  in  hand  with  cruelty  and  un- 
restrained will  to  power  is  accompanied  by  unmeasured 
and  unscrupulous  force. 

It  is  incredible  to  me  how  men  can  take  this  delirium 
of  self-destruction,  this  plunging  of  the  sword  into  our 
own  heart  in  a  final  frenzy  of  competing  anarchy  and 
deck  it  out  with  heroic  and  poetic  values,  fling  over  it 
the  seamless  robe  of  Christ,  unfurl  above  it  the  banner  of 
the  Cross!  The  only  contribution  the  World  War  has 
made  to  religion  has  been  to  throw  into  intolerable  relief 
the  essentially  irreligious  and  inhumane  character  of  our 
civilization. 

Of  course,  the  men  and  the  ideals  who  actually  fought 
the  contest  as  distinguished  from  the  men  and  ideals 
which  precipitated  it  and  determined  its  movements,  fill 
-gallant  pages  with  their  heroism  and  holy  sacrifice.  For 
wars  are  fought  by  the  young  at  the  dictation  of  the  old, 
and  youth  is  everywhere  humane  and  poetic.  Thus,  if  I 

93 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

may  be  permitted  to  quote  from  a  book  of  mine  recently 
published : 

"Our  sons  were  bade  to  enter  it  as  a  'war  to 
end  war/  a  final  struggle  which  should  abolish  the  intol- 
erable burdens  of  armaments  and  conscription.  They  were 
taught  to  exalt  it  as  a  strife  for  oppressed  and  help- 
less peoples ;  the  prelude  to  a  new  brotherhood  and  coop- 
eration among  the  nations,  and  to  that  reign  of  justice 
which  is  the  antecedent  condition  of  peace. 

"They  did  their  part.  With  adventurous  faith  they  glo- 
rified their  cause  and  offered  their  fresh  lives  to  make  it 
good.  Their  sacrifice,  the  idealism  which  lay  behind  it  in 
their  respective  communities — the  unofficial  perceptions 
that  they,  the  fathers  and  mothers  and  the  boys,  were 
fighting  to  vindicate  the  supremacy  of  the  moral  over  the 
material  factors  of  life — this  has  made  an  imperishable 
gift  to  the  new  world  and  our  children's  lives.  When  an 
entire  commuity  rises  to  something  of  magnanimity,  and 
a  nation  identifies  its  fate  with  the  lot  of  weaker  states, 
then  even  mutilation  and  death  may  be  gift-bringers  to 
mankind. 

"But  it  is  more  significant  to  our  purpose  to  note  that 
the  blood  of  youth  had  hardly  ceased  to  run  before  the 
officials  began  to  dicker  for  the  material  fruits  of  con- 
quest. Not  how  to  obtain  peace  but  how  to  exploit  vic- 
tory— to  wrest  each  for  himself  the  larger  tribute  from 
the  fallen  foe — became  their  primary  concern.  So  the 
youth  appear  to  have  died  for  a  tariff,  perished  for  trade 
routes  and  harbors,  for  the  furthering  of  the  commercial 
advantages  of  this  nation  as  against  that,  for  the  seizing 
of  the  markets  of  the  world.  They  supposed  they  fought 
'to  end  business  of  that  sort'  but  they  returned  to  find 
their  accredited  representatives  contemplating  universal 

94 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

military  service  in  frank  expectation  of  'the  next  war.' 
They  strove  for  the  'self-determination  of  peoples'  but 
find  that  it  was  for  some  people,  but  not  all.  And  as  for 
the  cooperation  among  nations,  Judge  Gary  has  recently 
told  us  that,  as  a  result  of  the  war,  we  should  prepare 
for  'the  fiercest  commercial  struggle  in  the  history  of 
mankind !' m 

Is  it  not  clear,  then,  today  that  behind  the  determin- 
ing as  distinguished  from  the  fighting  forces  of  the  war 
there  lay  a  commercial  and  financial  imperialism,  directed 
by  small  and  powerful  minorities,  largely  supported  by  a 
sympathetic  press  which  used  the  machinery  of  repre- 
sentative democracy  to  overthrow  a  more  naked  and  bru- 
tal imperialism  whose  machinery  was  that  of  a  military 
autocracy?  Motives,  scales  of  value,  methods  and  desired 
ends,  were  much  the  same  for  all  these  small  governing 
groups  as  they  operated  from  behind  the  various  shibbo- 
leths whose  magic  they  used  to  nerve  the  arms  of  the  con- 
tending forces.  The  conclusion  of  the  war  has  revealed 
the  common  springs  of  action  of  the  professional  soldier, 
statesman,  banker,  ecclesiastic,  in  our  present  civilization. 
On  the  whole  they  accept  the  rule  of  physical  might  as 
the  ultimate  justification  of  conduct.  They  are  the  lead- 
ers and  spokesmen  in  an  economic,  social  and  political 
establishment  which,  pretending  to  civilization,  always 
turns  when  strained  or  imperiled  by  foreign  or  domestic 
dangers  to  physical  force  as  the  final  arbiter. 

It  is  truly  ominous  to  see  the  gradual  extension  of  this 
naturalistic  principle  still  going  on  in  the  state.  The  coal 
strike  was  settled,  not  by  arbitration,  but  by  conference, 
and  "conferences"  appear  to  be  replacing  disinterested 
arbitration.  This  means  that  decisions  are  being  made  on 

1  Can  the  Church  Survive?  pp.  14  ff. 

95 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

the  principle  of  compromise,  dictated  by  the  expediency 
of  the  moment,  not  by  reference  to  any  third  party,  or 
to  some  fixed  and  mutually  recognized  standards.  This  is 
as  old  as  Pythagoras  and  as  new  as  Bergson  and  Croce; 
it  assumes  that  the  concept  of  justice  is  man-made,  pro- 
duced and  to  be  altered  by  expediences  and  practicalities, 
always  in  flux.  But  the  essence  of  a  civilization  is  the  hu- 
manistic conviction  that  there  is  something  fixed  and 
abiding  around  which  life  may  order  and  maintain  itself. 
Progress  rests  on  the  Platonic  theory  that  laws  are  not 
made  by  man  but  discovered  by  him;  that  they  exist  as 
eternal  distinctions  beyond  the  reach  of  his  alteration. 
Again,  an  unashamed  and  rampant  naturalism  has  just 
been  sweeping  this  country  in  the  wave  of  mean  and 
cruel  intolerance  which  insists  upon  the  continued  im- 
prisonment of  political  heretics,  which  would  prohibit 
freedom  of  speech  by  governmental  decree  and  oppose 
new  or  distasteful  ideas  by  the  physical  suppression  of  the 
thinker.  The  several  and  notorious  attempts  beginning 
with  deportations  and  ending  with  the  unseating  of  the 
New  York  assemblymen,  to  combat  radical  thinking  by 
physical  or  political  persecution — attempts  uniformly 
mean  and  universally  impotent  in  history — are  as  sinister 
as  they  are  stupid.  The  only  law  which  justifies  the  per- 
secution and  imprisonment  of  religious  and  political  here- 
tics is  neither  the  law  of  reason  nor  the  law  of  love,  but 
the  law  of  fear,  hence  of  tyranny  and  force.  When  a 
twentieth-century  nation  begins  to  raise  the  ancient  cry, 
"Come  now  and  let  us  kill  this  dreamer  and  we  shall  see 
what  will  become  of  his  dreams,"  that  nation  is  declining 
to  the  naturalistic  level.  For  this  clearly  indicates  that  the 
humane  and  religious  resources  of  civilization,  of  which 
the  church  is  among  the  chief  confessed  and  appointed 

96 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

guardians,  are  utterly  inadequate  to  the  strain  imposed 
upon  them.  Hence  force,  not  justice,  though  they  may 
sometimes  have  happened  to  coincide,  and  power,  not 
reason  or  faith,  are  becoming  the  embodiment  of  the 
state  today. 

We  come  now  to  the  final  question  of  our  chapter.  How 
has  this  renewal  of  naturalism  affected  the  church  and 
Christian  preaching?  On  the  whole  today,  the  Protestant 
church  is  accepting  this  naturalistic  attitude.  In  a  signed 
editorial  in  the  New  Republic  for  the  last  week  of  De- 
cember, 1919,  Herbert  Croly  said,  under  the  significant 
title  of  "Disordered  Christianity" :  "Both  politicians  and 
property  owners  consider  themselves  entitled  to  ignore 
Christian  guidance  in  exercising  political  and  economic 
power,  to  expect  or  to  compel  the  clergy  to  agree  with 
them  and  if  necessary  to  treat  disagreement  as  negligible. 
The  Christian  church,  as  a  whole,  or  in  part,  does  not 
protest  against  the  practically  complete  secularization  of 
political,  economic  and  social  life." 

You  may  say  such  extra-ecclesiastical  strictures  are  un- 
sympathetic and  ill  informed.  But  here  is  what  Washing- 
ton Gladden  wrote  in  January,  1918:  "If  after  the  war 
the  church  keeps  on  with  the  same  old  religion,  there  will 
be  the  same  old  hell  on  earth  that  religious  leaders  have 
been  preparing  for  centuries,  the  full  fruit  of  which  we 
are  gathering  now.  The  church  must  cease  to  sanction 
those  principles  of  militaristic  and  atheistic  nationalism 
by  which  the  rulers  of  the  earth  have  so  long  kept  the 
earth  at  war."1  Thus  from  within  the  sanctuary  is  the 
same  indictment  of  our  naturalism. 
.  But  you  may  say  Dr.  Gladden  was  an  old  man  and  a 
little  extreme  in  some  of  his  positions  and  he  belonged  to 

1  The  Pacific,  January  17,  1918. 

97 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

a  past  generation.  But  there  are  many  signs  at  the  present 
moment  of  the  increasing  secularizing  of  our  churches. 
The  individualism  of  our  services,  their  casual  character, 
their  romantic  and  sentimental  music,  their  minimizing 
of  the  offices  of  prayer  and  devotion,  their  increasing 
turning  of  the  pulpit  into  a  forum  for  political  discus- 
sion and  a  place  of  common  entertainment  all  indicate  it. 
There  is  an  accepted  secularity  today  about  the  organiza- 
tion. Church  and  preacher  have,  to  a  large  degree,  relin- 
quished their  essential  message,  dropped  their  religious 
values.  We  are  pretty  largely  today  playing  our  game 
the  world's  way.  We  are  adopting  the  methods  and  ac- 
cepting the  standards  of  the  market.  In  an  issue  last 
month  of  the  Inter-Church  Bulletin  was  the  following 
headline:  "Christianity  Hand  in  Hand  with  Business," 
and  underneath  the  following: 

"George  W.  Wickersham,  formerly  United  States 
attorney-general,  says  in  an  interview  that  there  is  noth- 
ing incompatible  between  Christianity  and  modern  busi- 
ness methods.  A  leading  lay  official  of  the  Episcopal 
Church  declares  that  what  the  churches  need  more  than 
anything  else  is  a  strong  injection  of  business  method  into 
their  management.  'Some  latter-day  Henry  Drummond,' 
he  said,  'should  write  a  book  on  Business  Law  in  the 
Spiritual  World.' " 

In  this  same  paper,  in  the  issue  of  March  27,  1920, 
there  was  an  article  commending  Christian  missions. 
The  first  caption  ran:  "Commercial  Progress  Follows 
Work  of  Protestant  Missions,"  and  its  subtitle  was 
"How  Missionaries  Aid  Commerce."  Here  is  Business 
Law  in  the  Spiritual  World!  Here  is  the  church  com- 
mended to  the  heathen  and  the  sinner  as  an  advertising 
agent,  an  advance  guard  of  commercial  prosperity,  a 

98 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

hawker  of  wares!  If  the  Bulletin  ever  penetrates  to 
those  benighted  lands  of  the  Orient  upon  which  we  are 
thus  anxious  to  bestow  the  so  apparent  benefits  of  our 
present  civilization  it  is  conceivable  that  even  the  untu- 
tored savage,  to  say  nothing  of  Chinamen  and  Japanese, 
might  read  it  with  his  tongue  in  his  cheek. 

Such  naive  opportunism  and  frantic  immediacy  would 
seem  to  me  conclusive  proof  of  the  disintegration  and 
anarchy  of  the  spirit  within  the  sanctuary.  It  is  a  part  of 
it  all  that  everyone  has  today  what  he  is  pleased  to  call 
"his  own  religion."  And  nearly  everyone  made  it  himself, 
or  thinks  he  did.  Conscience  has  ceased  to  be  a  check 
upon  personal  impulse,  the  "thou  shalt  not"  of  the  soul 
addressed  to  untutored  desires,  and  become  an  amiable 
instinct  for  doing  good  to  others.  The  Christian  is  an  ef- 
fusive creature,  loving  everything  and  everybody ;  exalt- 
ing others  in  terms  of  himself.  We  abhor  religious  con- 
ventions ;  in  particular  we  hasten  to  proclaim  that  we  are 
free  from  the  stigma  of  orthodoxy.  We  do  not  go  to 
church  to  learn,  to  meditate,  to  repent  and  to  pray;  we 
go  to  be  happy,  to  learn  how  to  keep  young  and  prosper- 
ous ;  it  is  good  business ;  it  pays.  We  have  a  new  and 
most  detestable  cant;  someone  has  justly  said  that  the 
natural  man  in  us  has  been  masquerading  as  the  spirit- 
ual man  by  endlessly  prating  of  "courage,"  "patriotism" 
— what  crimes  have  been  committed  in  its  name! — "de- 
velopment of  backward  people,"  "brotherhood  of  man," 
"service  of  those  less  fortunate  than  ourselves,"  "natural 
ethical  idealism,"  "the  common  destinies  of  nations" — 
and  now  he  rises  up  and  glares  at  us  with  stained  fingers 
and  bloodshot  eyes  j1  In  so  far  as  we  have  succumbed  to 
naturalism,  we  have  become  cold  and  shrewd  and  flexible ; 
.  1  Rousseau  and  Romanticism,  p.  376. 

99 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

shallow  and  noisy  and  effusive;  have  been  rather  proud 
to  believe  anything  in  general  and  almost  nothing  in  par- 
ticular; become  a  sort  of  religious  jelly  fish,  bumping 
blindly  about  in  seas  of  sentiment  and  labeling'  that  peace 
and  brotherhood  and  religion! 

Here,  then,  is  the  state  of  organized  religion  today  in 
our  churches.  They  are  voluntary  groups  of  men  and 
women,  long  since  emancipated  from  the  control  of  the 
church  as  such,  or  of  the  minister  as  an  official,  set  free 
also  from  Allegiance  to  historic  statements,  traditional, 
intellectual  sanctions  of  our  faith;  moulded  by  the  time 
spirit  which  enfolds  them  to  a  half-unconscious  ignoring 
or  depreciation  of  what  must  always  be  the  fundamental 
problem  of  religion — the  relationship  of  the  soul,  not 
to  its  neighbor,  but  to  God.  Hence  the  almost  total 
absence  of  doctrinal  preaching — indeed,  how  dare  we 
preach  Christian  doctrine  to  the  industry  and  politics 
and  conduct  of  this  age?  Hence  the  humiliating  striving 
to  keep  up  with  popular  movements,  to  conform  to  the 
moment.  Hence  the  placid  acceptance  of  military  propa- 
ganda and  even  of  vindictive  exhortation. 

Is  it  any  wonder  then  that  we  cannot  compete  with 
the  state  or  the  world  for  the  loyalty  of  men  and 
women?  We  have  no  substitute  to  offer.  Who  need 
be  surprised  at  the  restlessness,  the  fluidity,  the  elusive- 
ness  of  the  Protestant  laity?  And  who  need  wonder  that 
at  this  moment  we  are  depending  upon  the  externals  of 
machinery,  publicity  and  money  to  reinstate  ourselves  as 
a  spiritual  society  in  the  community?  A  well-known  of- 
ficial of  our  communion,  speaking  before  a  meeting  of 
ministers  in  New  York  City  on  Tuesday,  March  23,  was 
quoted  in  the  Springfield  Republican  of  the  next  day  as 
saying :  "The  church  holds  the  only  cure  for  the  possible 

100 


EATING,  DRINKING  AND  BEING  MERRY 

anarchy  of  the  future  and  offers  the  only  preventative 
for  the  hell  which  we  have  had  for  the  last  five  years. 
But  to  meet  this  challenge  the  church  can  only  go  as 
far — as  the  money  permits." 

Has  not  the  time  arrived  when,  if  we  are  to  find  our- 
selves again  in  the  world,  we  should  ask,  What  is  this  re- 
ligion in  which  we  believe  ?  What  is  the  real  nature  of  its 
resources?  What  the  real  nature  of  its  remedies?  Do 
we  dare  define  it  ?  And,  if  we  do,  would  we  dare  to  assert 
it,  come  out  from  the  world  and  live  for  it,  in  the  midst 
of  the  paganism  of  this  moment?  Is  it  true  that  without 
the  loaves  and  the  fishes  we  can  do  nothing?  If  so,  then 
we,  too,  have  succumbed  to  naturalism  indeed! 


101 


CHAPTER  FOUR 
The  Unmeasured  Gulf 

YOU  may  remember  that  when  Daniel  Webster 
made  his  reply  to  Hayne  in  the  Senate  he  began 
the  argument  by  a  return  to  first  principles. 
"When  the  mariner,"  said  he,  "has  been  tossed  for  many 
days  in  thick  weather  and  on  an  unknown  sea,  he  nat- 
urally avails  himself  of  the  first  pause  in  the  storm,  the 
earliest  glance  of  the  sun,  to  take  his  latitude,  and  ascer- 
tain how  far  the  elements  have  driven  him  from  his  true 
course.  Let  us  imitate  this  prudence  and  before  we  float 
further  on  the  waves  of  this  debate,  refer  to  the  point 
from  which  we  departed."  He  then  asked  for  the  reading 
of  the  resolution. 

It  is  to  some  such  rehearsing  of  our  original  message,  a 
restatement  of  the  thesis  which  we,  as  preachers,  are  set 
to  commend,  that  we  turn  ourselves  in  these  pages.  The 
brutal  dislocations  of  the  war,  and  the  long  and  confused 
course  of  disintegrating  life  that  lay  behind  it,  have 
driven  civilization  from  its  true  course  and  deflected  the 
church  from  her  normal  path,  her  natural  undertakings. 
Let  us  try,  then,  to  get  back  to  our  charter ;  define  once 
more  what  we  really  stand  for ;  view  our  human  life,  not 
as  captain  of  industry,  or  international  politician,  or  pa- 
gan worldling,  or  even  classic  hero,  would  regard  it,  but 
see  it  through  the  eyes  of  a  Paul,  an  Augustine,  a  Ber- 
nard, a  Luther,  the  Lord  Jesus.  We  have  already  re- 
marked how  timely  and  necessary  is  this  redefining  of  our 

102 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

religious  values.  If,  as  Lessing  said,  it  is  the  end  of  edu- 
cation to  make  men  to  see  things  that  are  large  as  large 
and  things  that  are  small  as  small,  it  is  even  more  truly 
the  end  of  Christian  preaching.  What  we  are  most  in  need 
of  today  is  a  corrected  perspective  of  our  faith ;  without 
it  we  darken  counsel  as  we  talk  in  confusion.  So,  while  we 
may  not  attempt  here  a  detailed  and  reasoned  statement 
of  religious  belief,  we  may  try  to  say  what  is  the  funda- 
mental attitude,  both  toward  nature  and  toward  man,  that 
lies  underneath  the  religious  experience.  We  have  seen 
that  we  are  not  stating  that  attitude  very  clearly  nowa- 
days in  our  pulpits;  hence  we  are  often  dealing  there 
with  sentimental  or  stereotyped  or  humane  or  even  pagan 
interpretations.  Yet  nothing  is  more  fatal  for  us;  if  we 
peddle  other  men's  wares  they  will  be  very  sure  that  we 
despise  our  own. 

We  approach,  then,  the  third  and  final  level  of  experi- 
ence to  which  we  referred  in  the  first  lecture.  We  have 
seen  that  the  humanist  accepts  the  law  of  measure;  he 
rests  back  upon  the  selected  and  certified  experience  of 
his  race;  from  within  himself,  as  the  noblest  inhabitant 
of  the  planet,  and  by  the  further  critical  observation  of 
nature  he  proposes  to  interpret  and  guide  his  life.  He  is 
convinced  that  this  combined  authority  of  reason  and  ob- 
servation will  lead  to  the  summum  bonum  of  the  golden 
mean  in  which  unbridled  self-expression  will  be  seen  as 
equally  unwise  and  indecent  and  ascetic  repression  as  both 
unworthy  and  unnecessary.  It  is  important  to  again  re- 
mind ourselves  that  confidence  in  the  human  spirit  as  the 
master  of  its  own  fate,  and  in  reason  and  natural  obser- 
vation as  offering  it  the  means  of  this  self-control  and 
understanding,  are  essential  humanistic  principles.  The 
humanist  world  is  rational,  social,  ethical. 

103 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

Over  against  this  reasonable  and  disciplined  view  of 
man  and  of  his  world  stands  naturalism.  It  exploits  the 
defects  of  the  classic  "virtue" ;  it  is,  so  to  speak,  human- 
ism run  to  seed.  Just  as  religion  so  often  sinks  into  big- 
otry, cruelty  and  superstitition,  so  humanism,  in  lesser 
souls,  declines  to  egotism,  license  and  sentimentality. 
Naturalism,  either  by  a  shallow  and  insincere  use  of  the 
materialistic  view  of  the  universe,  or  by  the  exalting  of 
wanton  feeling  and  whimsical  fancy  as  ends  in  them- 
selves, attempts  the  identification  of  man  with  the  natural 
order,  permits  him  to  conceive  of  each  desire,  instinct, 
impulse,  as,  being  natural,  thereby  defensible  and  valua- 
ble. Hence  it  permits  him  to  disregard  the  imposed  laws 
of  civilization — those  fixed  points  of  a  humane  order — 
and  to  return  in  principle,  and  so  far  as  he  dares  in  action, 
to  the  unlimited  and  irresponsible  individualism  of  the 
horde.  Inevitably  the  law  of  the  jungle  is  deliberately  ex- 
alted, or  unconsciously  adopted,  over  against  the  human- 
ist law  of  moderation  and  discipline. 

The  humanist,  then,  critically  studies  nature  and  man- 
kind, finding  in  her  matrix  and  in  his  own  spirit  data 
for  the  guidance  of  the  race,  improving  upon  it  by  a  culti- 
vated and  collective  experience.  The  naturalist  uncriti- 
cally exalts  nature,  seeks  identification  with  it  so  that  he 
may  freely  exploit  both  himself  and  it.  The  faith  of  the 
one  is  in  the  self-sufficiency  of  the  disciplined  spirit  of 
mankind;  the  unfaith  of  the  other  is  in  its  glorification 
of  the  natural  world  and  in  its  allegiance  to  the  momen- 
tary devices  and  desires  of  the  separate  heart.  It  will  be 
borne  in  mind  that  these  definitions  are  too  clear-cut ;  that 
these  divisions  appear  in  the  complexities  of  human  ex- 
perience, blurred  and  modified  by  the  welter  of  cross 
currents,  subsidiary  conflicting  movements,  which  ob- 

104 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

scure  all  human  problems.  They  represent  genuine  and 
significant  divisions  of  thought  and  conduct.  But  they 
appear  in  actual  experience  as  controlling  emphases 
rather  than  mutually  exclusive  territories. 

Now,  the  clearest  way  to  get  before  us  the  religious 
view  of  the  world  and  the  law  which  issues  from  it  is  to 
contrast  it  with  the  other  two.  In  the  first  place,  the  re- 
ligious temperament  takes  a  very  different  view  of  na- 
ture than  either  romantic,  or  to  a  less  degree  scientific, 
naturalism.  Naturalism  is  subrational  on  the  one  hand  or 
non-imaginative  on  the  other,  in  that  it  emphasizes  the 
continuity  between  man  and  the  physical  universe.  The 
religious  man  is  superrational  and  nobly  imaginative  as 
he  emphasizes  the  difference  between  man  and  nature. 
He  does  not  forget  man's  biological  kinship  to  the  brute, 
his  intimate  structural  and  even  psychological  relation  to 
the  primates,  but  he  is  aware  that  it  is  not  in  dwell- 
ing upon  these  facts  that  his  spirit  discovers  what  is  dis- 
tinctive to  man  as  man.  That  he  believes  will  be  found 
by  accenting  the  chasm  between  man  and  nature.  He  does 
not  know  how  to  conceive  of  a  personal  being  except  by 
thinking  of  him  as  proceeding  by  other,  though  not  con- 
flicting, laws  and  by  moving  toward  different  secondary 
ends  from  those  laws  and  ends  which  govern  the  imper- 
sonal external  world.  This  sense  of  the  difference  be- 
tween man  and  nature  he  shares  with  the  humanist,  only 
the  humanist  does  not  carry  it  as  far  as  he  does  and 
hence  may  not  draw  from  it  his  ultimate  conclusions. 

The  religious  view,  then,  begins  with  the  perception  of 
man's  isolation  in  the  natural  order;  his  difference  from 
his  surroundings.  That  sense  of  separateness  is  funda- 
mental to  the  religious  nature.  The  false  sentiment  and 
partial  science  of  the  pagan  which  stresses  the  identi- 

105 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

fication  of  man  and  beast  is  the  first  quarrel  that  religion- 
ist and  humanist  alike  have  with  him.  Neither  of  them 
sanctions  this  perversion  of  thought  and  feeling  which 
either  projects  the  impressionistic  self  so  absurdly  and 
perilously  into  the  natural  order,  or  else  minimizes  man's 
imaginative  and  intellectual  power,  leveling  him  down  to 
the  amoral  instinct  of  the  brute.  "How  much  more,"  said 
Jesus,  "is  a  man  better  than  a  sheep !"  One  of  the  great- 
est of  English  humanists  was  Matthew  Arnold.  You  re- 
member his  sonnet,  entitled,  alas!  "To  a  Preacher," 
which  runs  as  follows : 

"  In  harmony  with  Nature  ?  Restless  fool, 
Who  with  such  heat  doth  preach  what  were  to  thee, 
When  true,  the  last  impossibility — 
To  be  like  Nature  strong,  like  Nature  cool ! 
Know,  man  hath  all  which  Nature  hath,  but  more, 
And  in  that  more  lie  all  his  hopes  of  good, 
Nature  is  cruel,  man  is  sick  of  blood ; 
Nature  is  stubborn,  man  would  fain  adore ; 
Nature  is  fickle,  man  hath  need  of  rest ; 
Nature  forgives  no  debt  and  fears  no  grave; 
Man  would  be  mild,  and  with  safe  conscience  blest. 
Man  must  begin ;  know  this,  where  Nature  ends ; 
Nature  and  man  can  never  be  fast  friends. 
Fool,  if  thou  canst  not  pass  her,  rest  her  slave !" 

Religionist  and  humanist  alike  share  this  clear  sense 
of  separateness.  Literature  is  full  of  the  expression  of 
it.  Religion,  in  especial,  has  little  to  do  with  the  natural 
world  as  such.  It  is  that  other  and  inner  one,  which  can 
make  a  hell  of  heaven,  a  heaven  of  hell,  with  which  it 
is  chiefly  concerned.  Who  can  forget  Othello's  soliloquy 

106 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

as  he  prepares  to  darken  his  marriage  chamber  before 
the  murder  of  his  wife? 

"  Put  out  the  light,  and  then  put  out  the  light. 
If  I  quench  thee,  thou  flaming  minister, 
I  can  again  thy  former  light  restore, 
Should  I  repent  me ;  but  once  put  out  thy  light, 
Thou  cunning'st  pattern  of  excelling  nature, 
I  know  not  where  is  that  Promethean  heat, 
That  can  thy  light  relume.  When  I  have  pluck'd  the 

rose 

I  cannot  give  it  vital  growth  again, 
It  needs  must  wither." 

Indeed,  how  vivid  to  us  all  is  this  difference  between 
man  and  nature.  "I  would  to  heaven,"  Byron  traced  on 
the  back  of  the  manuscript  of  Don  Juan, 

"  I  would  to  heaven  that  I  were  so  much  clay, 
As  I  am  bone,  blood,  marrow,  passion,  feeling." 

Ah  me !  So  at  many  times  would  most  of  us.  And  in  that 
sense  that  we  are  not  is  where  the  religious  consciousness 
takes  its  beginning. 

Here  is  the  sense  of  the  gap  between  man  and  the  nat- 
ural world  felt  because  man  has  no  power  over  it.  He 
cannot  swerve  nor  modify  its  laws,  nor  do  his  laws  ac- 
knowledge its  ascendency  over  them.  But  what  makes 
the  gulf  deeper  is  the  sense  of  the  immeasurable  moral 
difference  between  a  thinking,  feeling,  self-estimating 
being  and  all  this  unheeding  world  about  him.  Whatever 
it  is  that  looks  out  from  the  windows  of  our  eyes  some- 
thing not  merely  of  wonder  and  desire  but  also  of  fear 
and  repulsion  must  be  there  as  it  gazes  into  so  cruel  as 
well  as  so  alien  an  environment.  For  a  moral  being  to 

107 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

glorify  nature  as  such  is  pure  folly  or  sheer  sentimental- 
ity. For  he  knows  that  her  apparent  repose  and  beauty  is 
built  up  on  the  ruthless  and  unending  warfare  of  matched 
forces,  it  represents  a  dreadful  equilibrium  of  pain.  He 
knows,  too,  that  that  in  him  which  allies  him  with  this 
natural  world  is  his  baser,  not  his  better  part.  This  nobly 
pessimistic  attitude  toward  the  natural  universe  and 
toward  man  so  far  as  he  shares  in  its  characteristics,  is 
found  in  all  classic  systems  of  theology  and  has  dominated 
the  greater  part  of  Christian  thinking.  If  it  is  ignored  to- 
day by  the  pseudo-religionists  and  the  sentimentalists ;  it 
is  clearly  enough  perceived  by  contemporary  science  and 
contemporary  art.  The  biologist  understands  it.  "I  know 
of  no  study,"  wrote  Thomas  Huxley,  "which  is  so  unut- 
terably saddening  as  that  of  the  evolution  of  humanity 
as  set  forth  in  the  annals  of  history.  Out  of  the  darkness 
of  prehistoric  ages  man  emerges  with  the  marks  of  his 
lowly  origin  strong  upon  him.  He  is  a  brute,  only  more 
intelligent  than  the  other  brutes ;  a  blind  prey  to  impulses 
which  as  often  as  not  lead  him  to  destruction;  a  victim 
to  endless  illusions  which  make  his  mental  existence  a 
terror  and  a  burden,  and  fill  his  physical  life  with  barren 
toil  and  battle.  He  attains  a  certain  degree  of  comfort, 
and  develops  a  more  or  less  workable  theory  of  life  in 
such  favorable  situations  as  the  plains  of  Mesopotamia 
or  of  Egypt,  and  then,  for  thousands  and  thousands  of 
years  struggles  with  various  fortunes,  attended  by  infi- 
nite wickedness,  bloodshed  and  misery,  to  maintain  him- 
self at  this  point  against  the  greed  and  ambition  of  his 
fellow  men.  He  makes  a  point  of  killing  and  otherwise  per- 
secuting all  those  who  first  try  to  get  him  to  move  on ;  and 
when  he  has  moved  a  step  farther  he  foolishly  confers 
post-mortem  deification  on  his  victims.  He  exactly  re- 

108 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

peats  the  process  with  all  who  want  to  move  a  step  yet 
farther."1 

And  no  less  does  the  artist,  the  man  of  high  and  cor- 
rect feeling,  perceive  the  immeasurable  distance  between 
uncaring  nature  and  suffering  men  and  women.  There  is, 
for  instance,  the  passage  in  The  Education  of  Henry 
Adams,  in  which  Adams  speaks  of  the  death  of  his  sister 
at  Bagni  di  Lucca.  "In  the  singular  color  of  the  Tuscan 
atmosphere,  the  hills  and  vineyards  of  the  Apennines 
seemed  bursting  with  midsummer  blood.  The  sick  room 
itself  glowed  with  the  Italian  joy  of  life;  friends  filled 
it;  no  harsh  northern  lights  pierced  the  soft  shadows; 
even  the  dying  woman  shared  the  sense  of  the  Italian 
summer,  the  soft  velvet  air,  the  humor,  the  courage,  the 
sensual  fullness  of  Nature  and  man.  She  faced  death,  as 
women  mostly  do,  bravely  and  even  gayly,  racked  slowly 
to  unconsciousness  but  yielding  only  to  violence,  as  a 
soldier  sabred  in  battle.  For  many  thousands  of  years, 
on  these  hills  and  plains,  Nature  had  gone  on  sabring  men 
and  women  with  the  same  air  of  sensual  pleasure. 

"Impressions  like  these  are  not  reasoned  or  catalogued 
in  the  mind;  they  are  felt  as  a  part  of  violent  emotion; 
and  the  mind  that  feels  them  is  a  different  one  from  that 
which  reasons;  it  is  thought  of  a  different  power  and  a 
different  person.  The  first  serious  consciousness  of  Na- 
ture's gesture — her  attitude  toward  life — took  form  then 
as  a  phantasm,  a  nightmare,  an  insanity  of  force.  For  the 
first  time  the  stage  scenery  of  the  senses  collapsed;  the 
human  mind  felt  itself  stripped  naked,  vibrating  in  a  void 
of  shapeless  energies,  with  resistless  mass,  colliding, 
crushing,  wasting  and  destroying  what  these  same  ener- 
gies had  created  and  labored  from  eternity  to  perfect." 

1  "Agnosticism,"  the  Nineteenth  Century,  February,  1889. 

109 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

Here  is  a  vivid  interpretation  of  a  universal  human  ex- 
perience. Might  not  any  one  of  us  who  had  endured  it 
turn  upon  the  pagan  and  sentimentalist,  crying  in  the  mood 
of  a  Swift  or  a  Voltaire,  "Ca  vous  amuse,  la  vie"?  The 
abstract  natural  rights  of  the  eighteenth  century  smack 
of  academic  complacency  before  this.  The  indignation  we 
feel  against  the  insolent  individualism  of  a  Louis  XIV 
who  cried  "L'etat  c'est  moil"  or  against  the  industrial 
overlord  who  spills  the  tears  of  women  for  his  ambition, 
the  sweat  of  the  children  for  his  greed,  is  as  nothing 
beside  the  indignation  with  the  natural  order  which 
any  biological  study  would  arouse  except  as  the 
scientist  perceives  that  indignation  is,  for  him,  beside  the 
point  and  the  religionist  believes  that  it  proceeds  from 
not  seeing  far  enough  into  the  process.  This  is  why  there 
is  an  essential  absurdity  in  any  naturalistic  system  of 
ethics.  Even  the  clown  can  say, 

"  Here's  a  night  that  pities 
Neither  wise  men  nor  fools." 

This  common  attitude  of  the  religionist  toward  nature 
as  a  remote  and  cruel  world,  alien  to  our  spirits,  is  abun- 
dantly reflected  in  literature.  It  finds  a  sort  of  final  con- 
summation in  the  intuitive  insight,  the  bright  understand- 
ing of  the  creative  spirits  of  our  race.  What  Aristotle 
defines  as  the  tragic  emotions,  the  sense  of  the  terror  and 
the  pity  of  human  life,  arise  partly  from  this  perception 
of  the  isolation  always  and  keenly  felt  by  dramatist  and 
prophet  and  poet.  They  know  well  that  Nature  does  not 
exist  by  our  law ;  that  we  neither  control  nor  understand 
it ;  is  it  not  our  friend  ? 

There  is,  then,  the  law  of  identity  between  man  and 
nature,  found  in  their  common  physical  origin ;  there  is 

no 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

also  the  law  of  difference.  It  is  on  that  aspect  of  reality 
that  religion  places  its  emphasis.  It  is  with  this  approach 
to  understanding  ourselves  that  preachers,  as  distin- 
guished from  scientists,  deal.  Our  present  society  is 
traveling  farther  and  farther  away  from  reality  in  so  far 
as  it  turns  either  to  the  outside  world  of  fact,  or  to  the 
domain  of  natural  law,  expecting  to  find  in  these  the  ele- 
ments of  insight  for  the  fresh  guidance  of  the  human 
spirit.  Not  there  resides  the  secret  of  the  beings  of  whom 
Shelley  said, 

"  We  look  before  and  after 
And  pine  for  what  is  not, 
Our  sincerest  laughter 
With  some  pain  is  fraught." 

Instinct  is  a  base,  a  prime  factor,  part  of  the  matrix  of 
personality.  But  personality  is  not  instinct ;  it  is  instinct 
plus  a  different  force;  instinct  transformed  by  spiritual 
insight  and  controlled  by  moral  discipline.  The  man  of  re- 
ligion, therefore,  finds  himself  not  in  one  but  two  worlds, 
not  indeed  mutually  exclusive,  having  a  common  origin, 
but  nevertheless  significantly  distinct.  Each  is  incomplete 
without  the  other,  each  in  a  true  sense  non-existent  with- 
out the  other.  But  that  which  is  most  vital  to  man's  world 
is  unknown  in  the  domain  of  nature.  Already  the  percep- 
tion of  a  dualism  is  here. 

But  now  a  third  element  comes  into  it.  There  is  some- 
thing spiritually  common  to  nature  and  man  behind  the 
one,  within  the  other.  This  Something  is  the  origin,  the 
responsible  agent  for  man's  and  nature's  physical  iden- 
tity. This  Something  binds  the  separates  into  a  sort  of 
whole.  This,  I  suppose,  is  what  Professor  Hocking  re- 
fers to  when  he  says,  "the  original  source  of  the  knowl- 

iii 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

edge  of  God  is  an  experience  which  might  be  described 
as  of  not  being  alone  in  knowing  the  world,  and  especially 
the  world  of  nature."1  Thus  the  religious  man  recognizes 
beyond  the  gulf,  behind  the  chasm,  something  more  like 
himself  than  it.  When  he  contemplates  nature,  he  sees 
something  other  than  nature ;  not  a  world  which  is  what 
it  seems  to  be,  but  a  world  whose  chief  significance  is  that 
it  is  more  than  it  seems  to  be.  It  is  a  world  where  appear- 
ance and  reality  are  inextricably  mingled  and  yet  sublimely 
and  significantly  separate.  In  short,  the  naturalist,  the  pa- 
gan, takes  the  world  as  it  stands ;  it  is  just  what  it  ap- 
pears; the  essence  of  his  irreligion  is  that  he  perceives 
nothing  in  it  that  needs  to  be  explained.  But  the  religion- 
ist knows  that  the  world  which  lies  before  our  mortal 
vision  so  splendid  and  so  ruthless,  so  beautiful  and  so 
dreadful,  does  really  gain  both  its  substance  and  signifi- 
cance from  immaterial  and  unseen  powers.  It  is  signifi- 
cant not  in  itself  but  because  it  hides  the  truth.  It  points 
forever  to  a  beyond.  It  is  the  vague  and  insubstantial 
pageant  of  a  dream.  Behind  it,  within  the  impenetrable 
shadows,  stands  the  Infinite  Watcher  of  the  sons  of  men. 

In  every  age  religious  souls  have  voiced  this  unearthli- 
ness  of  reality,  the  noble  other-worldliness  of  the  goals  of 
the  natural  order.  "Heard  melodies  are  sweet,  but  un- 
heard melodies  are  sweeter."  Poet,  philosopher  and  mystic 
have  sung  their  song  or  proclaimed  their  message  know- 
ing that  they  were  moving  about  in  worlds  not  realized, 
clearly  perceiving  the  incompleteness  of  the  phenomenal 
world  and  the  delusive  nature  of  sense  perceptions.  They 
have  known  a  Reality  which  they  could  not  comprehend ; 
felt  a  Presence  which  they  could  not  grasp.  They  have 
found  strength  for  the  battle  and  peace  for  the  pain  by 

1  The  Meaning  of  God  in  Human  Experience,  p.  236. 

112 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

regarding  nature  as  a  dim  projection,  a  tantalizing  inti- 
mation of  that  other,  conscious  and  creative  life,  that 
originating  and  directive  force,  which  is  not  nature  any 
more  than  the  copper  wire  is  the  electric  fluid  which  it 
carries — a  force  which  was  before  it,  which  moves  within 
it,  which  shall  be  after  it. 

So  poet  and  believer  and  mystic  find  the  key  to  nature, 
the  interpretation  of  that  alien  and  cruel  world,  not  by 
sinking  to  its  indifferent  level,  not  by  sentimental  exalta- 
tion of  its  specious  peace,  its  amoral  cruelty  and  beauty, 
but  by  regarding  it  as  the  expression,  the  intimation 
rather,  of  a  purposive  Intelligence,  a  silent  and  infinite 
Force,  beyond  it  all.  So  the  pagan  effuses  over  nature, 
gilding  with  his  sentimentality  the  puddles  that  the  beasts 
would  cough  at.  And  the  scientist  is  interested  in  efficient 
causes,  seeing  nature  as  an  unbroken  sequence,  an  endless 
uniformity  of  cause  and  effect,  against  whose  iron  chain 
the  spirit  of  mankind  wages  a  foredoomed  but  never 
ending  revolt.  But  the  religionist,  confessing  the  ruthless 
indifference,  the  amorality  which  he  distrusts  and  fears, 
and  not  denying  the  majestic  uniformity  of  order,  never- 
theless declares  that  these  are  not  self-made,  that  the 
amorality  is  but  one  half  and  that  the  confusing  half  of 
the  tale.  The  whole  creation  indeed  groaneth  and  tra- 
vaileth  in  pain,  but  for  a  final  cause,  which  alone  inter- 
prets or  justifies  it,  and  which  eventually  shall  set  it  free. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  nearly  all  poets  and  artists  thus  view 
nature  in  the  light  of  final  causes,  though  often  instinc- 
tively and  unconsciously  so.  For  what  they  sing  or  paint 
or  mould  is  not  the  landscape  that  we  see,  the  flesh  we 
touch,  but  the  life  behind  it,  the  light  that  never  was  on 
land  or  sea.  What  they  give  us  is  not  a  photograph  or  an 
inventory — it  is  worlds  away  from  such  naive  and  lying 

"3 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

realism.  But  they  hint  at  the  inexpressible  behind  expres- 
sion ;  paint  the  beauty  which  is  indistinguishable  from  na- 
ture but  not  identical  with  Nature.  They  make  us  see  that 
not  she,  red  in  tooth  and  claw,  but  that  intangible  and 
supernal  something-more,  is  what  gives  her  the  cleansing 
bath  of  loveliness.  No  reflective  or  imaginative  person 
needs  to  be  greatly  troubled,  therefore,  by  any  purely 
mechanical  or  materialistic  conception  of  the  universe. 
They  who  would  commend  that  view  of  the  cosmos  have 
not  only  to  reckon  with  philosophical  and  religious  ideal- 
ism, but  also  with  all  the  bright  band  of  poets  and  ar- 
tists and  seers.  Such  an  issue  once  resolutely  forced 
would  therewith  collapse,  for  it  would  pit  the  qualitative 
standards  against  the  quantitative,  the  imagination 
against  literalism,  the  creative  spirit  in  man  against  the 
machine  in  him. 

Here,  then,  is  the  difference  between  the  naturalist's 
and  the  religionist's  attitude  toward  Nature.  The  believer 
judges  Nature,  well  aware  of  the  gulf  between  himself 
and  her,  hating  with  inexpressible  depth  of  indignation 
and  repudiating  with  profound  contempt  the  sybarite's 
identification  of  human  and  natural  law.  But  also  he 
comes  back  to  her,  not  to  accept  in  wonder  her  variable 
outward  form,  but  to  worship  in  awe  before  her  invaria- 
ble inner  meaning.  Sometimes,  like  so  many  of  the  hu- 
manists, he  rises  only  to  a  vague  sense  of  the  mystic 
unity  that  fills  up  the  interspaces  of  the  world,  and  cries 
with  Wordsworth: 

"...  And  I  have  felt 
A  presence  that  disturbs  me  with  the  joy 
Of  elevated  thoughts;  a  sense  sublime 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 
Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 
114 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air, 
And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man; 
A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 
And  rolls  through  all  things."1 

Sometimes  he  dares  to  personalize  this  ultimate  and  then 
ascends  to  the  supreme  poetry  of  the  religious  experi- 
ence and  feels  the  cosmic  consciousness,  the  eternal  "I" 
of  this  strange  world,  which  fills  it  with  observant  maj- 
esty. And  then  he  chants, 

"  The  heavens  declare  the  glory  of  God, 
The  firmament  showeth  his  handiwork." 

Or  he  whispers, 

"  Whither  shall  I  go  from  Thy  spirit, 
Or  whither  shall  I  flee  from  Thy  presence  ? 
If  I  ascend  up  into  heaven,  Thou  art  there, 
If  I  make  my  bed  in  hell,  behold  Thou  art  there, 
If  I  take  the  wings  of  the  morning 
And  dwell  in  the  uttermost  parts  of  the  earth, 
Even  there  shall  Thy  hand  lead  me 
And  Thy  right  hand  shall  hold  me."2 

Indeed,  the  devout  religionist  almost  never  thinks  of  na- 
ture as  such.  She  is  always  the  bush  which  flames  and  is 
not  consumed.  Therefore  he  walks  softly  all  his  days, 
conscious  that  God  is  near. 

"  Of  old,"  he  says,  "Thou  hast  laid  the  foundations  of 

the  earth ; 
And  the  heavens  are  the  work  of  Thy  hands. 

.   1  Lines  composed  a  few  miles  above  Tintem  Abbey,  stanza  3, 
11.  36-45. 
2  Psalm  cxxxix.  7-9. 

"5 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

They  shall  perish,  but  Thou  shalt  endure ; 

Yea,  all  of  them  shall  wax  old  like  a  garment ; 

As  a  vesture  shalt  Thou  change  them,  and  they  shall 

be  changed; 
But  Thou  art  the  same, 
And  Thy  years  shall  have  no  end."1 

To  him  nature  is  the  glass  through  which  he  sees 
darkly  and  often  with  a  darkling  mind,  the  all-perva- 
sive Presence ;  it  is  the  veil — the  veil  that  covers  the  face 
of  God. 

Here,  then,  we  have  the  contrasting  attitude  of  world- 
ling and  believer  toward  nature,  the  outward  universe. 
Now  we  come  to  the  contrasting  attitude  of  humanist 
and  believer  toward  man,  the  world  within.  For  why 
are  we  so  sure,  first,  of  the  chasm  between  ourselves  and 
Nature  and,  second,  that  we  can  bridge  that  chasm  by 
reaching  out  to  something  behind  and  beyond  her  which 
is  more  like  us  than  her?  What  gives  us  the  key  to  her 
dualism  ?  Why  do  we  think  that  there  is  Something  which 
perpetually  beckons  to  us  through  her,  makes  awful 
signs  of  an  intimate  and  significant  relationship?  Be- 
cause we  feel  a  similar  chasm,  an  equal  cleft  in  our  own 
hearts,  a  division  in  the  moral  nature  of  mankind.  We 
know  that  gulf  between  us  and  the  outward  world  be- 
cause we  know  the  greater  gulf  between  flesh  and  spirit, 
between  the  natural  man  and  the  real  man,  between  the 
"I"  and  the  "other  I." 

Here  is  where  the  humanist  bids  us  good-by  and  we 
must  go  forward  on  our  road  alone.  For  he  will  not  ac- 
knowledge that  there  is  anything  essential  or  permanent 
in  that  divided  inner  world ;  he  would  minimize  it  or  ex- 

i  Psalm  cii.  25-27. 

116 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

plain  it  away.  But  we  know  it  is  there  and  the  reason  we 
know  there  is  Something  without  which  can  bridge  the 
outer  chasm  is  because  we  also  know  there  is  Something- 
Else  within  which  might  bridge  this  one.  For  we  who  are 
religious  know  that  within  the  depths  and  the  immensities 
of  this  inner  world,  where  there  is  no  space  but  where 
there  is  infinite  largeness,  where  there  is  no  time  but 
where  there  is  perpetual  strife,  there  is  Something- 
Else  as  well  as  the  "I"  and  the  "other  I,"  and  it  is  that 
He  who  is  the  Something-Else  who  alone  can  close  the 
gap  in  that  divided  kingdom  and  make  us  one  with  our- 
selves, hence  with  Himself  and  hence  with  His  world. 

You  ask  how  we  can  say,  "He's  there;  He  knows." 
We  answer  that  this  "other,"  this  "He"  is  a  constant  fig- 
ure in  the  experience ;  always  in  the  vision ;  an  integral 
part  of  the  perception.  What  is  He  like?  "He"  is  purity 
and  compassion  and  inexorableness.  Something  fixed,  im- 
mutable, not  to  be  tricked,  not  to  be  evaded  and  oh !  all- 
comprehending.  He  sees,  his  eyes  run  to  and  fro  in  all  the 
dark  and  wide,  the  light  and  high  dominions  of  the  soul. 
If  we  will  not  come  to  terms  with  "Him,"  that  eternal 
and  changeless  life  will  be  the  cliff  against  which  the 
tumultuous  waves  of  the  divided  spirit  shall  shatter  and 
dissipate  into  soundless  foam ;  if  we  will  come  to  terms, 
relinquish,  accept,  surrender,  then  that  purity  and  that 
compassion  will  be  the  cleansing  tide,  the  healing  and 
restoring  flood  in  which  we  sink  in  the  ecstasy  of  self-loss 
to  arise  refreshed,  radiant,  and  made  whole. 

So  we  reckon  from  within  out.  The  religious  view  of  the 
world  is  based  upon  the  religious  experience  of  the  soul. 
We  have  no  other  means  of  getting  at  reality.  I  know  that 
there  is  Something-more  than  me  and  Something-more 
than  the  nature  outside  of  me,  because  we  know  that 

117 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

there  is  Something  which  is  not  me  and  is  not  nature,  in- 
side of  me.  So  the  man  of  religion,  like  any  other  poet, 
artist,  seer,  looks  in  his  own  heart  and  writes.  What 
he  finds  there  is  real,  or  else,  as  far  as  he  is  con- 
cerned, there  is  no  reality.  He  does  not  assert  that  this 
reality  is  the  final  and  utter  truth.  But  he  knows  it  is  his 
trustworthy  mediator  of  that  truth. 

Here,  then,  is  an  immense  separation  between  religion- 
ist and  both  humanist  and  naturalist;  a  separation  so 
complete  as  to  come  full  circle.  We  are  convinced  of  the 
secondary  value,  both  of  natural  appearances  and  of  the 
mortal,  temporal  consciousness.  So  we  substitute  for  im- 
pertinent familiarity  with  Nature,  a  reverent  regard  for 
what  she  half  reveals,  half  hides.  We  interpret  her  by 
ourselves.  We  are  the  same  compound  of  identity  and 
difference.  We  acknowledge  our  continuity  with  the  nat- 
ural world,  our  intimate  and  tragic  alliance  with  the  dust, 
but  we  also  know  that  we,  within  ourselves,  are  Some- 
thing-Else as  well.  And  it  is  that  Something-Else  in  us 
which  makes  the  significant  part  of  us,  which  sets  our 
value  and  place  in  the  scale  of  being. 

In  short,  the  dualism  of  nature  is  revealed  in  the  dual- 
ism of  the  soul.  There  is  a  gulf  within,  and  if  only  man 
can  span  the  inner  chasm,  he  will  know  how  to  bridge  the 
outer.  He  must  begin  by  finding  God  within  himself,  or 
he  will  never  find  Him  anywhere.  Now,  it  is  out  of  this 
sense  of  a  separation  within  himself,  from  himself 
and  from  the  Author  of  himself,  that  there  arises  that 
awful  sense  of  helplessness,  of  dependence,  of  be- 
wilderment, which  is  the  second  great  element  in  the  re- 
ligious life.  Man  is  alone  in  the  world;  man  is  helpless 
in  the  world ;  man  ought  not  to  be  alone  in  the  world ; 
man  is  therefore  under  scrutiny  and  condemnation;  he 

118 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

must  find  reconciliation,  harmony,  companionship, 
somehow,  somewhere.  Hence  the  religious  man  is  not 
arrogant  like  the  pagan,  nor  proud  like  the  humanist ;  he 
is  humble.  It  is  Burke,  I  think,  who  says  that  the  whole 
ethical  life  of  man  has  its  roots  in  this  humility.1  The 
religious  man  cannot  help  but  be  humble.  He  has  an  awful 
pride  in  his  kinship  with  heaven,  but,  standing  before 
the  Lord  of  heaven,  he  feels  human  nature's  proper 
place,  its  confusion  and  division  and  helplessness ;  its  de- 
pendence upon  the  higher  Power. 

It  is  at  this  point  that  humanism  and  religion  definitely 
part  company.  The  former  does  not  feel  this  absolute  and 
judging  Presence,  hence  cannot  understand  the  spirit- 
ual solicitude  of  the  latter.  St.  Paul  was  not  quite  at 
home  on  Mars  Hill ;  it  was  hard  to  make  those  who  were 
always  hearing  and  seeing  some  new  thing  understand; 
the  shame  and  humility  of  the  cross  were  an  unnecessary 
foolishness  to  them.  So  they  have  always  been.  The  hu- 
manist cannot  take  seriously  this  sense  of  a  transcendent 
reality.  When  Cicero,  to  escape  the  vengeance  of  Clodius, 
withdrew  from  Rome,  he  passed  over  into  Greece  and 
dwelt  for  a  while  in  Thessalonica.  One  day  he  saw 
Mount  Olympus,  the  lofty  and  eternal  home  of  the  dei- 
ties of  ancient  Greece.  "But  I,"  said  the  bland  eclectic 
philosopher,  "saw  nothing  but  snow  and  ice." 

How  inadequate,  then,  as  a  substitute  for  religion,  is 
even  the  noblest  humanism.  True  and  fine  as  far  as  it 
goes,  it  does  not  go  far  enough  for  us.  It  takes  too  little 
account  of  the  divided  life.  It  appears  not  to  understand 
it.  On  the  whole  it  refuses  to  acknowledge  that  it  really 
exists,  or,  if  it  does,  it  is  convinced  of  man's  unaided 
ability  to  efface  it.  It  isn't  something  inevitable.  Hence 

1  Correspondence,  III,  p.  213. 

119 


the  pride  which  is  an  essential  quality  of  the  humanistic 
attitude. 

But  the  religious  man  knows  that  it  does  exist  and 
that  while  he  is  not  wholly  responsible  for  it,  yet  he  is 
essentially  so  and  that,  alas,  in  spite  of  that  fact,  he  alone 
cannot  bridge  it.  So  he  cries,  "Wretched  man  that  I  am, 
what  shall  I  do  to  be  saved  ?"  Here  is  the  feeling  of  un- 
easiness, the  sense  of  something  being  wrong  about  us 
as  we  naturally  stand,  of  which  James  speaks.  In  that 
sense  of  responsibility  is  the  confession  of  sin  and  in  the 
confession  of  sin  is  the  acknowledgment  of  the  impo- 
tence of  the  sinner. 

"  The  moving  finger  writes,  and  having  writ,  moves  on 
Nor  all  your  wit  nor  all  your  tears,  can  wash  a  line  of 
it." 

Man  cannot,  unaided,  make  his  connection  with  this 
higher  power.  The  world  is  at  fault,  yes,  but  we  are  at 
fault,  something  both  within  and  without  dreadfully 
needs  explaining.  So  man  is  subdued  and  troubled  by  the 
infinite  mystery ;  and  he  cannot  accept  the  place  in  which 
he  finds  himself  in  that  mystery ;  he  is  ashamed  of  it. 

Vivid,  then,  is  his  sense  of  helplessness !  It  makes  him 
resent  the  humanist,  who  bids  him,  unaided,  solve  his 
fate  and  be  a  man.  That  is  giving  him  stones  when  he 
asks  for  bread.  He  knows  that  advice  makes  an  inhuman 
demand  upon  the  will ;  it  assumes  a  reasonableness,  an  in- 
sight and  a  moral  power,  which  for  him  do  not  exist; 
it  ignores  or  it  denies  the  reality  and  the  meaning  of  this 
inner  gulf.  It  is  important  to  note  that  even  as  philosophy 
and  art  and  literature  soon  parted  company  with  the  nat- 
uralist, so,  to  a  large  degree,  they  part  company  with  the 
humanist,  too.  They  do  not  know  very  much  of  an  harmo- 

120 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

nious  and  triumphant  universe.  Few  of  the  world's 
creative  spirits  have  ever  denied  that  inner  chasm  or 
minimized  its  tragic  consequences  to  mankind.  Isaiah 
and  Paul  and  John  and  Augustine  and  Luther  are  wrung 
with  the  consciousness  of  it.  Indeed,  the  antithesis  be- 
tween flesh  and  spirit  is  too  familiar  in  religious  lit- 
erature to  need  any  recounting.  It  is  more  vividly 
brought  home  to  us  from  the  nonprofessional,  the  disin- 
terested and  involuntary  testimony  of  secular  writing. 
Was  there  ever  such  a  cry  of  revolt  on  the  part  of  the 
trapped  spirit  against  the  net  and  slough  of  natural  val- 
ues and  natural  desires  as  runs  through  the  sonnets  of 
William  Shakespeare  ?  We  remember  the  104th : 

"  Poor  soul,  the  centre  of  my  sinful  earth, 
Foiled  by  these  rebel  powers  that  thee  array, 
Why  dost  thou  pine  within,  and  suffer  dearth, 
Painting  thine  outward  walls  so  costly  gay? 
Why  so  large  cost,  having  so  short  a  lease, 
Dost  thou  upon  thy  fading  mansion  spend? 
Shall  worms,  inheritors  of  this  excess, 
Eat  up  thy  charge  ?  Is  this  thy  body's  end  ? 
Then  soul,  live  thou  upon  thy  servant's  loss 
And  let  that  pine  to  aggravate  thy  store, 
Buy  terms  divine  in  selling  hours  of  dross 
Within  be  fed,  without  be  rich  no  more — " 

Or  turn  to  our  contemporary  poet,  James  Stephens : 

"  Good  and  bad  are  in  my  heart 
But  I  cannot  tell  to  you 
For  they  never  are  apart 
Which  is  the  better  of  the  two. 

121 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

I  am  this :  I  am  the  other 
And  the  devil  is  my  brother 
And  my  father  he  is  God 
And  my  mother  is  the  sod, 
Therefore  I  am  safe,  you  see 
Owing  to  my  pedigree. 

So  I  cherish  love  and  hate 
Like  twin  brothers  in  a  nest 
Lest  I  find  when  it's  too  late 
That  the  other  was  the  best."1 

Here,  then,  we  find  the  next  thing  which  grows  out  of 
man's  sense  of  separation  both  from  nature  and  from 
his  own  best  self.  It  is  his  moral  judgment  on  himself  as 
well  as  on  the  world  outside,  and  that  power  to  judge 
shows  that  he  is  greater  than  either.  As  Dr.  Gordon  says, 
"Every  honest  man  lives  under  the  shadow  of  his  own 
rebuke."  We  can  go  far  with  the  humanist  in  acknowl- 
edging the  failures  that  are  due  to  environment,  to  in- 
completeness, to  ignorance;  we  do  not  forget  the  help- 
less multitude  who  sit  in  darkness  and  in  the  shadow  of 
death;  and  we  agree  with  the  scientist  that  their  help- 
lessness foredooms  them  and  that  their  fate  cannot  be 
laid  to  their  charge.  But  we  go  far  beyond  where  scien- 
^  tist  and  humanist  stop.  For  we  know  that  the  deepest 
cause  of  human  misery  is  not  inheritance,  is  not  environ- 
ment, is  not  ignorance,  is  not  incompleteness ;  it  is  the  in- 
\  formed  but  the  perverse  human  will.  Just  as  unhappiness 
;  is  the  consciousness  of  the  divided  mind,  so  guilt  is  this 
'sense  of  the  deliberately  divided  will.  Jonathan   Swift 
knew  that ;  on  every  yearly  recurrence  of  the  hour  in 
which  he  came  into  the  world,  he  cried  lamentably,  "Let 
the  day  perish  wherein  I  was  born." 
1  Songs  from  the  Clay,  p.  40. 

122 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

The  Lord  Jesus  knew  it,  too.  His  teaching,  unlike  that 
of  Paul,  does  not  throw  into  the  foreground  the  divided 
will  and  its  accompanying  sense  of  sin  and  guilt.  But  he 
does  not  ignore  it.  He  brought  it  out  with  infinite  tender- 
ness but  inexorable  clearness  in  the  parables  of  the  lost 
sheep,  the  lost  coin  and  the  lost  boy.  The  sheep  were  but 
young  and  silly,  they  did  not  wish  to  be  lost  on  the 
mountain-side;  they  knew  no  better;  inexperience,  ig- 
norance were  theirs,  and  for  their  sad  estate  they  were 
not  held  responsible.  For  them  the  compassionate  shep- 
herd sought  until  he  found  them  in  the  wilds,  took  them, 
involuntary  burdens,  on  his  heart,  brought  them  back  to 
safety  and  the  fold.  The  coin  had  no  native  affinity  with\ 
the  dirt  and  grime  of  the  careless  woman's  house.  It  was 
only  a  coin,  attached  to  anklet  or  bracelet,  having  no 
power,  no  independence  of  its  own;  where  it  fell,  there 
must  it  lie.  So  with  the  lives  set  by  fate  in  the  refuse 
and  grime  of  our  industrial  civilization,  the  pure  minted 
gold  effectually  concealed  by  the  obscurity  and  filth 
around.  For  such  lives,  victims  of  environment,  the  Fa- 
ther will  search,  too,  until  they  are  found,  taken  up,  and 
somewhere,  in  this  world  or  another,  restored  to  their 
native  worth.  But  the  chief  of  the  parables,  and  the  one 
that  has  captured  the  imagination  and  subdued  the  heart 
of  mankind,  because  it  so  true  to  the  greater  part  of  life, 
is  the  story  of  the  lost  boy.  For  he  was  the  real  sinner  and 
he  was  such  because,  knowing  what  he  was  about  and  able 
to  choose,  he  desired  to  do  wrong.  It  was  not  ignorance, 
nor  environment,  nor  inheritance,  that  led  him  into  the 
far  country.  It  was  its  alien  delights  and  their  alien  na- 
ture, for  which  as  such  he  craved.  How  subtle  and  certain 
is  the  word  of  Jesus  here.  No  shepherd  seeks  this  wander- 
ing sheep;  no  householder  searches  for  this  lost  coin. 

123 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

The  boy  who  willed  to  do  wrong  must  stay  with  the  swine 
among  the  husks  until  he  wills  to  do  right.  Then,  when 
he  desires  to  return,  return  is  made  possible  and  easy,  but 
the  responsibility  is  forever  his.  The  source  of  his  misery 
is  his  own  will. 

So  the  disposition  of  mankind  is  at  the  bottom  of  the 
suffering  and  the  division.  There  is  rebellion  and  per- 
verseness  mingled  with  the  helplessness  and  ignorance 
and  sorrow.  No  man  ever  understands  or  can  speak  to 
the  religious  life  unless  he  has  the  consciousness  of  this 
inner  moral  cleft.  No  man  will  ever  be  able  to  preach  with 
power  about  God  unless  he  does  it  chiefly  in  terms  of 
God's  difference  from  man  and  man's  perilous  estate  and 
desperate  need  of  Him.  Indeed,  God  is  not  like  us,  not 
like  this  inner  life  of  ours;  this  is  what  we  want  to  hear. 
God  is  different;  that  is  why  we  want  to  be  able  to  love 
Him.  And  being  thus  different,  we  are  separated  from 
Him,  both  by  the  inner  chasm  of  the  divided  soul  and 
the  outer  chasm  of  remote  and  hostile  nature.  Then 
comes  the  final  question :  How  are  we,  being  helpless,  to 
reach  Him?  How  are  we,  being  guilty,  to  find  Him? 

When  men  deal  with  these  queries,  with  this  range  of 
experience,  this  set  of  inward  perceptions,  then  they  are 
preaching  religiously.  And  then,  I  venture  to  say,  they 
do  not  fail  either  of  hearers  or  of  followers.  Then  there 
is  what  Catherine  Booth  used  to  call  "liberty  of  speech" ; 
then  there  is  power  because  then  we  talk  of  realities. 
For  what  is  it  that  looks  out  from  the  eyes  of  re- 
ligious humanity?  Rebellion,  pride?  no!  Humility,  loneli- 
ness, something  of  a  just  and  deserved  fear;  but  most 
of  all,  desire,  insatiable,  unwavering,  an  intense  desire. 
This  passion  of  the  race,  its  never  satisfied  hunger,  its 
incredible  intensity  and  persistency  of  striving  and  long- 

124 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

ing,  is  at  once  the  tragedy  and  glory,  the  witness  to  the 
helplessness,  the  revelation  of  the  capacity  of  the  race. 
The  mainspring  of  human  activity,  the  creative  impulse 
from  which  in  devious  ways  all  the  thousand-hued  mo- 
tives of  our  lives  arise,  is  revealed  in  the  ancient  cry, 
"My  soul  thirsteth  for  God,  for  the  living  God!"  That 
unquenched  thirst  for  Him  underlies  all  human  life,  as 
the  solemn  stillness  of  the  ocean  underlies  the  restless 
upper  waves.  The  dynamic  of  the  world  is  the  sense  of 
the  divine  reality.  The  woe  of  the  world  is  man's  inabil- 
ity to  discover  and  appropriate  that  reality.  Who  that 
has  entered  truly  into  life  does  not  perceive  beneath  all 
the  glitter  of  its  brilliance,  the  roar  of  its  energy  and 
achievement,  the  note  of  melancholy?  The  great  under- 
tone of  life  is  solemn  in  its  pathetic  uniformity.  The 
poets  and  prophets  of  the  world  have  seized  unerringly 
upon  that  melancholy  undertone.  Who  ever  better  under- 
stood the  futility  and  helplessness  of  unaided  man,  the 
certain  doom  that  tracks  down  his  pride  of  insolence,  or 
his  sin,  than  the  Greek  tragedians?  Sophocles,  divided 
spirit  that  he  was,  heard  that  note  of  melancholy  long 
ago  by  the  ^Egean,  wrote  it  into  his  somber  dramas, 
with  their  turbid  ebb  and  flow  of  human  misery.  Some- 
times the  voices  of  our  humanity  as  they  rise  blend  and 
compose  into  one  great  cry  that  is  lifted,  shivering  and 
tingling,  to  the  stars,  "Oh,  that  I  knew  where  I  might 
find  Him !"  Sometimes  and  more  often  they  sink  into 
a  subdued  and  minor  plaint,  infinitely  touching  in  its  hu- 
man solicitude,  perplexity  and  pain.  Again,  James  Ste- 
-phens  has  phrased  it  for  us  in  his  verse  The  Nodding 
Stars.* 
1  Songs  from  the  Clay,  p.  68. 

125 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

"  Brothers,  what  is  it  ye  mean, 
What  is  it  ye  try  to  say 
That  so  earnestly  ye  lean 
From  the  spirit  to  the  clay. 

"  There  are  weary  gulfs  between 
Here  and  sunny  Paradise, 
Brothers!  What  is  it  ye  mean 
That  ye  search  with  burning  eyes, 

"  Down  for  me  whose  fire  is  clogged, 
Clamped  in  sullen,  earthy  mould, 
Battened  down  and  fogged  and  bogged, 
Where  the  clay  is  seven-fold." 

Now  we  understand  the  tragic  aspect  of  nature  and 
of  the  human  soul  caught  in  this  cosmic  dualism  with- 
out which  corresponds  to  the  ethical  dualism  within. 
This  perception  of  the  One  behind  the  many  in  nature, 
of  the  thing-in-itself ,  as  distinguished  from  the  many  ex- 
pressions of  that  thing,  is  the  chief  theme  for  preaching. 
This  is  what  brings  men  to  themselves.  Herein,  as  Dr. 
Newman  Smyth  has  pointed  out,  appears  the  unique 
marvel  of  personality.  "It  becomes  conscious  of  itself  as 
individual  and  it  individualizes  the  world;  it  is  the  one 
discovering  itself  among  the  many.  In  the  midst  of  uni- 
formities of  nature,  moving  at  will  on  the  plane  of  nat- 
ural necessities,  weaving  the  pattern  of  its  ideas  through 
the  warp  of  natural  laws,  runs  the  personal  life.  On  the 
same  plane  and  amid  these  uniformities,  yet  itself  a 
sphere  of  being  of  another  order ;  in  it,  yet  disentangled 
from  it,  and  having  its  center  in  itself,  it  lives  and  moves 
and  has  its  being,  breaking  no  thread  of  nature's  weav- 

126 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

ing,  subject  to  its  own  law,  and  manifesting  a  dynamic 
of  its  own."1 

The  source,  then,  as  we  see  it,  of  all  human  hopes  and 
human  dignity,  the  urge  that  lies  behind  all  metaphysics 
and  much  of  literature  and  art,  the  thing  that  makes  men 
eager  to  live,  yet  nobly  curious  to  die,  is  this  conviction 
that  One  like  unto  ourselves  but  from  whom  we  have 
made  ourselves  unlike,  akin  to  our  real,  if  buried,  person, 
walketh  with  us  in  the  fiery  furnace  of  our  life.  There 
is  a  Spirit  in  man  and  the  breath  of  the  Almighty  giveth 
him  understanding.  Starting  from  this  interpretation,  we 
can  begin  to  order  the  baffling  and  teasing  aspects,  the 
illusive  nature  of  the  world.  Why  this  ever  failing,  but 
never  ending  struggle  against  unseen  odds  to  grasp  and 
understand  and  live  with  the  Divine?  Why,  between  the 
two,  the  absolute  and  the  changeless  spirit,  unseen  but 
felt,  and  the  hesitant  and  timid  spirit  of  a  man,  would 
there  seem  to  be  a  great  gulf  fixed?  Because  we  are 
wrong.  Because  man  finds  the  gulf  within  himself.  He 
chafes  at  the  limitations  of  time  and  space?  Yes;  but  he 
chafes  more  at  the  mystery  and  weakness,  the  mingled 
deceitfulness  and  cunning  and  splendor  of  the  human 
heart.  Because  there  is  no  one  of  us  who  can  say,  I  have 
made  my  life  pure,  I  am  free  from  my  sin.  He  knows 
that  the  gulf  is  there  between  the  fallible  and  human, 
and  the  more  than  human;  he  does  not  know  how  to 
cross  it;  he  says, 

"  I  would  think  until  I  found 
Something  I  can  never  find 
Something  lying  on  the  ground 
In  the  bottom  of  my  mind." 

Here,  then,  can  we  not  understand  that  mingling  of 

1  The  Meaning  of  the  Personal  Life,  p.  173. 

127- 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

mystic  dignity  and  profound  humility,  of  awe-struck 
pride  and  utter  self-abnegation,  wherewith  the  man  of  re- 
ligion regards  his  race  and  himself  ?  He  is  the  child  of  the 
Eternal ;  he,  being  man,  alone  knows  that  God  is.  "When 
I  consider  the  heavens,  the  work  of  Thy  fingers,  the 
moon  and  the  stars  which  Thou  hast  ordained,  what  is 
man  that  Thou  art  mindful  of  him,  or  the  son  of  man 
that  Thou  visitest  him?"  Here  is  the  humility:  "Why 
so  hot,  little  man!"  Then  comes  the  awe-struck 
pride:  "Yet  Thou  hast  made  him  a  little  lower  than  the 
angels  and  crowned  him  with  glory  and  honor."  "Alone 
with  the  gods,  alone !"  God  is  the  high  and  lofty  one 
which  inhabiteth  eternity,  but  He  is  also  nigh  unto  them 
who  are  of  a  broken  and  a  contrite  heart. 

Here  we  are  come  to  the  very  heart  of  religion.  Man's 
proud  separateness  in  the  universe;  yet  man's  moral  de- 
fection and  his  responsibility  for  it  which  makes  him 
know  that  separateness  ;  man's  shame  and  helplessness  un- 
der it.  Over  against  the  denial  or  evasion  of  moral  values 
by  the  naturalist  and  the  dullness  to  the  sense  of  moral 
helplessness  by  the  humanist,  there  stands  the  sense  of 
moral  difference,  the  sense  of  sin,  of  penitence  and  con- 
fession. No  preaching  not  founded  on  these  things  can 
ever  be  called  religious  or  can  ever  stir  those  ranges  of 
the  human  life  for  which  alone  preaching  is  supposed 
to  exist. 

What  is  the  religious  law,  then?  It  is  the  law  of  hu- 
mility. And  what  is  the  religious  consciousness?  The 
sense  of  man's  difference  from  nature  and  from  God. 
The  sense  of  his  difference  from  himself  within  himself 
and  the  longing  for  an  inner  harmony  which  shall  unite 
him  with  himself  and  with  the  beauty  and  the  spirit  with- 
out. So  what  is  the  religious  passion  ?  Is  it  to  exalt  human 

128 


THE  UNMEASURED  GULF 

nature  ?  It  would  be  more  true  to  say  it  is  to  lose  it.  What 
is  the  end  for  us  ?  Not  identification  with  nature  and  the 
natural  self,  but  pursuit  of  the  other  than  nature,  the 
more  than  natural  self.  Our  humility  is  not  like  that  of 
Uriah  Keep,  a  mean  opinion  of  ourselves  in  comparison 
with  other  men.  It  is  the  profound  consciousness  of  the 
weakness  and  the  nothingness  of  our  kind,  and  of  the 
poor  ends  human  nature  sets  its  heart  upon,  in  compari- 
son with  that  Other  One  above  and  beyond  and  without 
us,  to  whom  we  are  kin,  from  whom  we  are  different,  to 
whom  we  aspire,  to  reach  whom  we  know  not  how. 

This,  then,  is  what  we  mean  when  we  turn  back  from 
the  language  of  experience  to  the  vocabulary  of  philoso- 
phy and  theology  and  talk  about  the  absolute  values  of 
religion.  We  mean  by  "absolute  values"  that  behind  the 
multifarious  and  ever  changing  nature,  is  a  single  and  a 
steadfast  cause — a  great  rock  in  a  weary  land.  We  have 
lost  the  old  absolute  philosophies  and  dogmatic  theolo- 
gies and  that  is  good  and  right,  for  they  were  outworn. 
But  we  are  never  going  to  lose  the  central  experience 
that  produced  them,  and  our  task  is  to  find  a  new  phi- 
losophy to  express  these  inner  things  for  which  the 
words  "supernatural,"  "absolute,"  are  no  longer  intelligi- 
ble. For  we  still  know  that  behind  man's  partial  and 
relative  knowledge,  feeling,  willing,  is  an  utter  knowledge, 
a  perfect  feeling,  a  serene  and  unswerving  will ;  that  be- 
neath man's  moral  anarchy  there  is  moral  sovereignty; 
that  behind  his  helplessness  there  is  abundant  power  to 
save.  Perhaps  this  Other  is  always  changing,  but,  if  so, 
it  is  a  Oneness  which  is  changing.  In  short,  the  thing  that 
is  characteristic  of  religion  is  that  it  dwells,  not  on  man's 
likenesses,  but  on  his  awful  differences  from  nature 
and  from  God;  sees  him  not  as  little  counterparts  of 

129 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

deity,  but  as  broken  fragments  only  to  be  made  whole 
within  the  perfect  life.  It  sees  relativity  as  the  law  of  our 
being,  yes,  but  relativity,  not  of  the  sort  that  excludes, 
but  is  included  in,  a  higher  absolute,  even  as  the  planet 
swings  in  infinite  space. 

The  trouble  with  much  preaching  is  that  it  lacks  the 
essentially  religious  insight ;  in  dwelling  on  man's  identi- 
ties it  confuses  or  drugs,  not  clarifies  and  purges,  the 
spirit.  Thus  it  obscures  the  gulf.  Sometimes  it  evades  it, 
or  bridges  it  by  minimizing  it,  and  genuinely  religious 
people,  and  those  who  want  to  be  religious,  and  those 
who  might  be,  know  that  such  preaching  is  not  real  and 
that  it  does  not  move  them  and,  worst  of  all,  the  hungry 
sheep  look  up  and  are  not  fed.  For  in  such  preaching 
there  is  no  call  to  humility,  no  plea  for  grace,  no  sense 
that  the  achievement  of  self-unity  is  as  much  a  rescue  as 
it  is  a  reformation.  But  this  sense  of  the  need  of  salvation 
is  integral  to  religion;  this  is  where  it  has  parted  com- 
pany with  humanism.  Humanism  makes  no  organic  rela- 
tions between  man  and  the  Eternal.  It  is  as  though  it 
thought  these  would  take  care  of  themselves!  In  the 
place  of  grace  it  puts  pride ;  pride  of  caste,  of  family,  of 
character,  of  intellect.  But  high  self-discipline  and  pride 
in  the  human  spirit  are  not  the  deepest  or  the  high- 
est notes  man  strikes.  The  cry,  not  of  pride  in  self, 
but  for  fellowship  with  the  Infinite,  is  the  superlative  ex- 
pression of  man.  Augustine  sounded  the  highest  note  of 
feeling  when  he  wrote,  "O  God,  Thou  hast  made  us  for 
Thyself,  and  our  hearts  are  restless  until  they  rest  in 
Thee."  The  words  of  the  Lord  Jesus  gave  the  clearest 
insight  of  the  human  mind  when  He  said,  "And  when  he 
came  to  himself,  he  said,  I  will  arise  and  go  to  my  Fa- 
ther." 

130 


CHAPTER  FIVE 
Grace,  Knowledge,  Virtue 

I  HOPE  the  concluding  paragraphs  of  the  last  chap- 
ter brought  us  back  into  the  atmosphere  of  re- 
ligion, into  that  sort  of  mood  in  which  the  reality 
of  the  struggle  for  character,  the  craving  of  the  human 
spirit  to  give  and  to  receive  compassion,  the  cry  of  the 
lonely  soul  for  the  love  of  God,  were  made  manifest. 
These  are  the  real  goods  of  life  to  religious  natures ;  they 
need  this  meat  which  the  world  knoweth  not  of ;  there 
is  a  continuing  resolve  in  them  to  say,  "Good-by,  proud 
world,  I'm  going  home!"  The  genuinely  religious  man 
must,  and  should  indeed,  live  in  this  world,  but  he  can- 
not live  of  it. 

Merely  to  create  such  an  atmosphere  then,  to  induce 
this  sort  of  mood,  to  shift  for  men  their  perspectives, 
until  these  needs  and  values  rise  once  more  compelling 
before  their  eyes,  is  a  chief  end  of  preaching.  Its  object 
is  not  so  much  moralizing  or  instructing  as  it  is  in- 
terpreting and  revealing ;  not  the  plotting  out  of  the  land- 
scape at  our  feet,  but  the  lifting  of  our  eyes  to  the  hills, 
to  the  fixed  stars.  Then  we  really  do  see  things  that  are 
large  as  large  and  things  that  are  small  as  small.  We  need 
that  vision  today  from  religious  leaders  more  than  we 
need  any  other  one  thing. 

For  humanism  and  naturalism  between  them  have 
brought  us  to  an  almost  complete  secularization  of 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

preaching,  in  which  its  characteristic  elements,  its  dis- 
tinctive contribution,  have  largely  feded  from  liberal 
speaking  and  from  the  consciousness  of  its  hearers.  We 
have  emphasized  man's  kinship  with  nature  until  now  we 
can  see  him  again  declining  to  the  brute;  we  have  pro- 
claimed the  divine  Immanence  until  we  think  to  compass 
the  Eternal  within  a  facile  and  finite  comprehension.  By 
thus  dwelling  on  the  physical  and  rational  elements  of 
human  experience,  religion  has  come  to  concern  itself  to 
an  extraordinary  degree  with  the  local  and  temporal 
reaches  of  faith.  We  have  lost  the  sense  of  communion 
with  Absolute  Being  and  of  the  obligation  to  standards 
higher  than  those  of  the  world,  which  that  communion 
brings.  Out  of  this  identification  of  man  with  nature  has 
come  the  preaching  which  ignores  the  fact  of  sin ;  which 
reduces  free  will  and  the  moral  responsibility  of  the  in- 
dividual to  the  vanishing  point;  which  stresses  the  con- 
trol of  the  forces  of  inheritance  and  environment  to  the 
edge  of  fatalistic  determinism;  which  leads  man  to  re- 
gard himself  as  unfortunate  rather  than  reprehensible 
when  moral  disaster  overtakes  him ;  which  induces  that 
condoning  of  the  moral  rebel  which  is  born  not  of  love 
for  the  sinner  but  of  indifference  to  his  sin ;  which  issues 
in  that  last  degeneration  of  self-pity  in  which  individuals 
and  societies  alike  indulge;  and  in  that  repellent  senti- 
mentality over  vice  and  crime  which  beflowers  the  mur- 
derer while  it  forgets  its  victim,  which  turns  to  ouija 
boards  and  levitated  tables  to  obscure  the  solemn  finality 
of  death  and  to  gloze  over  the  guilty  secrets  of  the  bat- 
tlefield. 

Thus  it  has  come  about  that  we  preach  of  God  in  terms 
of  the  drawing-room,  as  though  he  were  some  vast  St. 
Nicholas,  sitting  up  there  in  the  sky  or  amiably  inform- 

132 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

ing  our  present  world,  regarding  with  easy  benevolence 
His  minute  and  multifarious  creations,  winking  at  our 
pride,  our  cruelty,  our  self-love,  our  lust,  not  greatly  car- 
ing if  we  break  His  laws,  tossing  out  His  indiscriminate 
gifts,  and  vaguely  trusting  in  our  automatic  arrival  at 
virtue.  Even  as  in  philosophy,  it  is  psychologists,  experts 
in  empirical  science  and  methods,  and  sociologists,  ex- 
perts in  practical  ethics,  who  may  be  found,  while  the 
historian  and  the  metaphysician  are  increasingly  rare,  so 
in  preaching  we  are  amiable  and  pious  and  ethical  and 
practical  and  informative,  but  the  vision  and  the  ab- 
solutism of  religion  are  a  departing  glory. 

What  complicates  the  danger  and  difficulty  of  such  a 
position,  with  its  confusion  of  natural  and  human  values, 
and  its  rationalizing  and  secularizing  of  theistic  think- 
ing, is  that  it  has  its  measure  of  reality.  All  these 
observations  of  naturalist  and  humanist  are  half 
truths,  and  for  that  very  reason  more  perilous  than  utter 
falsehoods.  For  the  mind  tends  to  rest  contented 
within  their  areas,  and  so  the  partial  becomes  the  worst 
enemy  of  the  whole.  What  we  have  been  doing4  is  stress- 
ing the  indubitable  identity  between  man  and  nature  and 
between  the  Creator  and  His  creatures  to  the  point  of 
unreality,  forgetting  the  equally  important  fact  of 
the  difference,  the  distinction  between  the  two.  But  sound 
knowledge  and  normal  feeling  rest  upon  observing  and 
reckoning  with  both  aspects  of  this  law  of  kinship  and 
contrast.  All  human  experience  becomes  known  to 
us  through  the  interplay  of  what  appear  to  be  contra- 
dictory needs  and  opposing  truths  within  our  being.  Thus, 
man  is  a  social  animal  and  can  only  find  himself  in  a  series 
of  relationships  as  producer,  lover,  husband,  father  and 
friend.  He  is  a  part  of  and  like  unto  his  kind,  his  spirit 

133 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

immanent  in  his  race.  But  man  is  also  a  solitary  creature, 
and  in  that  very  solitariness,  which  he  knows  as  he  con- 
trasts it  with  his  social  interests,  he  finds  identity  of  self, 
the  something  which  makes  us  "us,"  which  separates  us 
from  all  others  in  the  world.  A  Crusoe,  marooned  on  a 
South  Sea  island,  without  even  a  black  man  Friday  for 
companionship,  would  soon  cease  to  be  a  man ;  personal- 
ity would  forsake  him.  But  the  same  Crusoe  is  equally 
in  need  of  solitude.  The  hell  of  the  barracks,  no  matter 
how  well  conducted,  is  their  hideous  lack  of  privacy; 
men  condemned  by  shipwreck  or  imprisonment  to  an  un- 
broken and  intimate  companionship  kill  their  comrade  or 
themselves.  We  are  all  alike  and  hence  gregarious;  we 
are  all  different  and  hence  flee  as  a  bird  to  the  mountain. 
The  reality  of  human  personality  lies  in  neither  one  as- 
pect of  the  truth  nor  the  other,  but  in  both.  The  truth  is 
found  as  we  hold  the  balance  between  identity  and  dif- 
ference. Hence  we  are  not  able  to  think  of  personality  in 
the  Godhead  unless  we  conceive  of  God  as  being,  within 
Himself,  a  social  no  less  than  a  solitary  Being. 

Again,  this  law  that  the  truth  is  found  in  the  balance 
of  the  antinomies  appears  in  man's  equal  passion  for  con- 
tinuity and  permanency  and  for  variety  and  change.  The 
book  of  Revelation  tells  us  that  the  redeemed,  before  the 
great  white  throne,  standing  upon  the  sea  of  glass,  sing 
the  song  of  Moses  and  the  Lamb.  What  has  the  one  to 
do  with  the  other?  Here  is  the  savage,  triumphant  chant 
of  the  far  dawn  of  Israel's  history,  joined  with  the  fur- 
thest and  latest  possible  events  and  words.  Well,  it 
at  least  suggests  the  continuity  of  the  ageless  struggle  of 
mankind,  showing  that  the  past  has  its  place  in  the  pres- 
ent, relieving  man's  horror  of  the  impermanence,  the  dis- 
jointed character  of  existence.  He  wants  something  or- 

134 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

derly  and  static.  But,  like  the  jet  of  water  in  the  fountain, 
his  life  is  forever  collapsing  and  collapsing,  falling  in 
upon  itself,  its  apparent  permanence  nothing  but  a  rapid 
and  glittering  succession  of  impermanences.  The  dread 
of  growing  old  is  chiefly  that,  as  years  come  on,  life 
changes  more  and  faster,  becomes  a  continual  process  of 
readjustment.  Therefore  we  want  something  fixed;  like 
the  sailor  with  his  compass,  we  must  have  some  needle, 
even  if  a  tremulous  one,  always  pointing  toward  a 
changeless  star.  Yet  this  is  but  one  half  of  the  picture. 
Does  man  desire  continuity  ? — quite  as  much  does  he  wish 
for  variety,  cessation  of  old  ways,  change  and  fresh  be- 
ginnings. The  most  terrible  figure  which  the  subtle  im- 
agination of  the  Middle  Ages  conjured  up  was  that  of  the 
Wandering  Jew,  the  man  who  could  not  die !  Here,  then, 
we  arrive  at  knowledge,  the  genuine  values  of  experi- 
ence, by  this  same  balancing  of  opposites.  Continuity 
alone  kills;  perpetual  change  strips  life  of  significance; 
man  must  have  both. 

Now,  it  is  in  the  religious  field  that  this  interests  us 
most.  We  have  seen  that  what  we  have  been  doing  there 
of  late  has  been  to  ignore  the  fact  that  reality  is 
found  only  through  this  balancing  of  the  law  of  differ- 
ence and  identity,  contrast  and  likeness.  We  have  been 
absorbed  in  one  half  of  reality,  identifying  man  with  na- 
ture, prating  of  his  self-sufficiency,  seeing  divinity  almost 
exclusively  as  immanent  in  the  phenomenal  world.  Thus 
we  have  not  merely  been  dealing  with  only  one  half  of  the 
truth,  but  that,  to  use  a  solecism,  the  lesser  half. 

For  doubtless  men  do  desire  in  religion  a  recognition 
of  the  real  values  of  their  physical  nature.  And  they  want 
rules  of  conduct,  a  guide  for  practical  affairs,  a  scale  of 
values  for  this  world.  This  satisfies  the  craving  for  tem- 

135 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

poral  adjustment,  the  sense  of  the  goodness  and  worth  of 
what  our  instinct  transmits  to  us.  But  it  does  nothing  to 
meet  that  profound  dissatisfaction  with  this  world  and 
that  sense  of  the  encumbrances  of  the  flesh  which  is  also 
a  part  of  reality  and,  to  the  religious  man,  perhaps  the 
greater  part.  He  wants  to  turn  away  from  all  these  pres- 
ent things  and  be  kept  secretly  in  a  pavilion  from  the 
strife  of  tongues.  Here  he  has  no  continuing  city.  Al- 
ways while  we  dwell  here  we  have  a  dim  and  restless 
sense  that  we  are  in  an  unreal  country  and  we  know,  in 
our  still  moments,  that  we  shall  only  come  to  ourselves 
when  we  return  to  the  house  of  our  Father.  Hence  men 
have  never  been  satisfied  with  religious  leaders  who 
chiefly  interpreted  this  world  to  them. 

And  indeed,  since  July,  1914,  and  down  to  and  includ- 
ing this  very  hour,  this  idealizing  of  time,  which  we  had 
almost  accepted  as  our  office,  has  had  a  ghastly  exposure. 
Because  there  has  come  upon  us  all  one  of  these  irrevoca- 
ble and  irremediable  disasters,  for  which  time  has  no 
word  of  hope,  to  which  Nature  is  totally  indifferent,  for 
which  the  God  of  the  outgoings  and  incomings  of  the 
morning  is  too  small.  For  millions  of  living  and  suffer- 
ing men  and  women  all  temporal  and  mortal  values  have 
been  wiped  out.  They  have  been  caught  in  a  catas- 
trophe so  ruthless  and  dreadful  that  it  has  strewed  their 
bodies  in  heaps  over  the  fields  and  valleys  of  many  na- 
tions. Today  central  and  south  and  northeastern  Europe 
and  western  Asia  are  filled  with  idle  and  hungry  and 
desperate  men  and  women.  They  have  been  deprived  of 
peace,  of  security,  of  bread,  of  enlightenment  alike.  Some- 
thing more  than  temporal  salvation  and  human  words  of 
hope  are  needed  here.  Something  more  than  ethical  re- 
form and  social  readjustment  and  economic  alleviation, 

136 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

admirable  though  these  are !  Something  there  must  be  in 
human  nature  that  eclipses  human  nature,  if  it  is  to  en- 
dure so  much!  What  has  the  God  of  this  world  to  give 
for  youth,  deprived  of  their  physical  immortality  and  all 
their  sweet  and  inalienable  human  rights,  who  are  lying 
now  beneath  the  acre  upon  acre  of  tottering  wooden 
crosses  in  their  soldier's  graves  ?  Is  there  anything  in  this 
world  sufficient  now  for  the  widow,  the  orphan,  the  crip- 
ple, the  starving,  the  disillusioned  and  the  desperate? 
What  Europe  wants  to  know  is  why  and  for  what  pur- 
pose this  holocaust — is  there  anything  beyond,  was  there 
anything  before  it?  A  civilization  dedicated  to  speed  and 
power  and  utility  and  mere  intelligence  cannot  answer 
these  questions.  Neither  can  a  religion  resolved  into 
naught  but  the  ethics  of  Jesus  answer  them.  "If  in  this 
world  only,"  cries  today  the  voice  of  our  humanity,  "we 
have  hope,  then  we  are  of  all  men  the  most  miserable!" 
When  one  sees  our  American  society  of  this  moment  re- 
turning so  easily  to  the  physical  and  the  obvious  and  the 
practical  things  of  life;  when  one  sees  the  church  im- 
mersed in  programs,  and  moralizing,  and  hospitals,  and 
campaigns,  and  membership  drives,  and  statistics,  and 
money  getting,  one  is  constrained  to  ask,  "What  shall  be 
said  of  the  human  spirit  that  it  can  forget  so  soon?" 

Is  it  not  obvious,  then,  that  our  task  for  a  pagan  soci- 
ety and  a  self-contained  humanity  is  to  restore  the  bal- 
ance of  the  religious  consciousness  and  to  dwell,  not  on 
man's  identity  with  Nature,  but  on  his  far-flung  differ- 
ence; not  on  his  self-sufficiency,  but  on  his  tragic  help- 
lessness; not  on  the  God  of  the  market  place,  the  office 
and  the  street,  an  immanent  and  relative  deity,  but  on  the 
Absolute,  that  high  and  lofty  One  who  inhabiteth  eter- 
nity ?  Indeed,  we  are  being  solemnly  reminded  today  that 

137 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

the  other-worldliness  of  religion,  its  concern  with  future, 
supertemporal  things,  is  its  characteristic  and  most  pre- 
cious contribution  to  the  world.  We  are  seeing  how  every 
human  problem  when  pressed  to  its  ultimate  issue  be- 
comes theological.  Here  is  where  the  fertile  field  for  con- 
temporary preaching  lies.  It  is  found,  not  in  remaining 
with  those  elements  in  the  religious  consciousness  which 
it  shares  in  common  with  naturalism  and  humanism,  but 
in  passing  over  to  those  which  are  distinctive  to  itself 
alone.  It  has  always  been  true,  but  it  is  especially  true  at 
this  moment,  that  effective  preaching  has  to  do  chiefly 
with  transcendent  values. 

Our  task  is  to  assert,  first,  then,  the  "otherness"  of 
man,  his  difference  from  Nature,  to  point  out  the  illusori- 
ness  of  her  phenomena  for  him,  the  derived  reality  and 
secondary  value  of  her  facts.  These  are  things  that  need 
religious  elucidation.  The  phrase  "other-worldliness"  has 
come,  not  without  reason,  to  have  an  evil  connotation 
among  us,  but  there  is  nevertheless  a  genuine  disdain  of 
this  world,  a  sense  of  high  superiority  to  it  and  profound 
indifference  toward  it,  which  is  of  the  essence  of  the 
religious  attitude.  He  who  knows  that  here  he  is  a 
stranger,  sojourning  in  tabernacles ;  that  he  belongs  by 
his  nature,  not  to  this  world,  but  that  he  seeks  a  better, 
that  is  to  say,  a  heavenly  country,  will  for  the  joy  that  is 
set  before  him,  endure  a  cross  and  will  despise  the  shame. 
He  will  have  a  conscious  superiority  to  hostile  facts  of 
whatever  sort  or  magnitude,  for  he  knows  that  they  de- 
ceive in  so  far  as  they  pretend  to  finality.  When  religion 
has  thus  acquired  a  clear-sighted  and  thoroughgoing  in- 
difference to  the  natural  order,  then,  and  then  only,  it  be- 
gins to  be  potent  within  that  order.  Then,  as  Professor 

138 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

Hocking  says,  it  rises  superior  to  the  world  of  facts  and 
becomes  irresistible.1 

The  time  is  ripe,  then,  first,  for  the  preacher  to  empha- 
size the  inward  and  essential  difference  between  man  and 
nature  which  exists  under  the  outward  likeness,  to  re- 
mind him  of  this  more-than-nature,  this  "otherness"  of 
man,  without  which  he  would  lose  his  most  precious  pos- 
session, the  sense  of  personality.  Faith  begins  by  recog- 
nizing this  transcendent  element  in  man  and  the  accept- 
ance of  it  is  the  foundation  of  religious  preaching.  What 
was  the  worst  thing  about  the  war?  Not  its  destruction 
nor  its  horrors  nor  its  futilities,  but  its  shames ;  the 
dreadful  indignities  which  it  inflicted  upon  man;  it 
treated  men  as  though  they  were  not  souls !  No  such 
moral  catastrophe  could  have  overwhelmed  us  if  we  had 
not  for  long  let  the  brute  lie  too  near  the  values  and 
practices  of  our  lives,  depersonalizing  thus,  in  politics 
and  industry  and  morals  and  religion,  our  civilization.  It 
all  proceeded  from  the  irreligious  interpretation  of  hu- 
man existence,  and  the  fruits  of  that  interpretation  are 
before  us. 

The  first  task  of  the  preacher,  then,  is  to  combat  the 
naturalistic  interpretation  of  humanity  with  every  insight 
and  every  conviction  that  is  within  his  power.  If  we  are 
to  restore  religious  values,  rebuild  a  world  of  transcend- 
ent ends  and  more-than-natural  beauty,  we  must  begin 
here  with  man.  In  the  popular  understanding  of  the 
phrase  all  life  is  not  essentially  one  in  kind ;  physi- 
cal self-preservation  and  reproduction  are  not  the  be-all 
and  the  end-all  of  existence.  There  is  something  more  to 
be  expressed  in  man  without  which  these  are  but  dust  and 
ashes  in  the  mouth.  There  is  another  kind  of  life  mixed  in 

1  The  Meaning  of  God  in  Human  Experience,  p.  518. 

139 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

with  this,  the  obvious.  If  we  cannot  express  the  other 
world,  we  shall  not  long  tolerate  this  one.  To  think  that 
this  world  is  all,  leans  toward  madness ;  such  a  picture  of 
man  is  a  travesty,  not  a  portrait  of  his  nature.  Only  on 
some  such  basic  truths  as  these  can  we  build  character 
in  our  young  people.  Paganism  tells  them  that  it  is 
neither  natural  nor  possible  to  keep  themselves  unspotted 
from  the  world.  Over  against  it  we  must  reiterate,  You 
can  and  you  must !  for  the  man  that  sinneth  wrongeth  his 
own  soul.  You  are  something  more  than  physical  hunger 
and  reproductive  instinct;  you  are  of  spirit  no  less  than 
dust.  How,  then,  can  you  do  this  great  sin  against  God ! 

How  abundant  here  are  the  data  with  which  religious 
preaching  may  deal.  Indeed,  as  Huxley  and  scores  of 
others  have  pointed  out,  it  is  only  the  religious  view  of 
man  that  builds  up  civilization.  A  great  community  is  the 
record  of  man's  supernaturalism,  his  uniqueness.  It  is 
built  on  the  "higher-than-self"  principle  which  is  in- 
volved in  the  moral  sense  itself.  And  this  higher-than- 
self  is  not  just  a  collective  naturalism,  a  social  conscious- 
ness, as  Durkheim  and  Overstreet  and  Miss  Harrison 
would  say.  The  simplest  introspective  act  will  prove  that. 
For  a  man  cannot  ignore  self-condemnation  as  if  it  were 
only  a  natural  difficulty,  nor  disparage  it  as  though  it  were 
merely  humanly  imposed.  We  think  it  comes  from  that 
which  is  above  and  without,  because  it  speaks  to  the  soli- 
tary and  the  unique,  not  the  social  and  the  common  part 
of  us.  Hence  conscience  is  not  chiefly  a  tribal  product, 
for  it  is  what  separates  us  from  the  group  and  in  our 
isolation  unites  us  with  something  other  than  the  group. 
"Against  Thee,  Thee  only,  have  I  sinned  and  done  this 
evil  in  Thy  sight."  So  religious  preaching  perpetually 

140 


i 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

holds  us  up  above  our  natural  selves  and  the  natural 
order. 

Thus  man  must  live  by  an  other-than-natural  law  if 
he  is  to  preserve  the  family,  which  is  the  social  unit  of 
civilization.  Its  very  existence  depends  upon  modifying 
and  transforming  natural  hunger  by  a  diviner  instinct,  by 
making  voluntary  repressions,  willing  sacrifices  of  the 
lower  to  the  higher,  the  subordinating  of  the  law  of  self 
and  might  to  the  law  of  sacrifice  and  love — this  is  what  o| 
preserves  family  life.  Animals  indeed  rear  and  cherish 
their  young  and  for  the  mating  season  remain  true  to  one 
another,  but  no  animality  per  se  ever  yet  built  a  home. 
There  must  be  a  more-than-natural  law  in  the  state.  Our 
national  life  and  honor  rest  upon  the  stability  of  the  './ 
democracy  and  we  can  only  maintain  that  by  walking  a  c 
very  straight  and  narrow  path.  For  the  peace  of  freedom  : 
as  distinguished  from  precarious  license  is  a  more-than- 
natural  attainment,  born  of  self-repression  and  social  dis- 
cipline, the  voluntary  relinquishment  of  lesser  rights  for 
higher  rights,  of  personal  privileges  for  the  sake  of  the     .  • 
common  good.  Government  by  the  broad  and  easy  path,  i 
following  the  lines  of  least  resistance,  like  the  natural  or-  ( 
der,  saying  might  is  right,  means  either  tyranny  or  an-  I 
archy.  Circumspice!  One  of  the  glories  of  western  civili- 
zation is  its  hospitals.  They  stand  for  the  supernaturaL 
doctrine  of  the  survival  of  the  unfit,  the  conviction  of  the 
community  that,  to  take  the  easy  path  of  casting  out  the 
aged  and  infirm,  the  sick  and  the  suffering,  would  mean 
incalculable  degeneration  of  national  character,  and  that 
the  difficult  and  costly  path  of  protection  and  minister- 
ing service  is  both  necessary  and  right.  And  why  is  the 
reformatory    replacing   the    prison?    Because    we    have 
learned  that  the  obvious,  natural  way  of  dealing  with  the 

141 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

criminal  certainly  destroys  him  and  threatens  to  destroy 
us;  and  that  the  hard,  difficult  path  of  reeducating  and 
reforming  a  vicious  life  is  the  one  which  the  state  for  her 
own  safety  must  follow. 

Genuine  preaching,  then,  first  of  all,  calls  men  to  re- 
pentance, bids  them  turn  away  from  their  natural  selves, 
and,  to  find  that  other  and  realer  self,  enter  the  straight 
and  narrow  gate.  The  call  is  not  an  arbitrary  command, 
born  of  a  negative  and  repressive  spirit.  It  is  a  profound 
exhortation  based  upon  a  fundamental  law  of  human 
progress,  having  behind  it  the  inviolable  sanction  of  the 
truth.  Such  preaching  would  have  the  authentic  note.  It 
is  self -verify  ing.  It  stirs  to  answer  that  quality — both 
moral  and  imaginative — in  the  spirit  of  man  which 
craves  the  pain  and  difficulty  and  satisfaction  of  separa- 
tion from  the  natural  order.  It  appeals  to  a  timeless 
worth  in  man  which  transcends  any  values  of  mere  in- 
telligence which  vary  with  the  ages,  or  any  material  pros- 
perity which  perishes  with  the  using,  or  any  volitional  ac- 
tivity that  dies  in  its  own  expenditure.  Much  of  the  phi- 
losophy of  Socrates  was  long  ago  outmoded,  but  Socrates 
himself,  as  depicted  in  the  Phaedo,  confronting  death 
with  the  cup  of  hemlock  in  his  hand,  saying  with  a  smile, 
"There  is  no  evil  which  can  happen  to  a  good  man  liv- 
ing or  dead,"  has  a  more-than-natural,  an  enduring  and 
transcendent  quality.  Whenever  we  preach  to  the  ele- 
ment in  mankind  which  produces  such  attitudes  toward 
life  and  bid  it  assert  itself,  then  we  are  doing  religious 
preaching,  and  then  we  speak  with  power.  Jesus  lived 
within  the  inexorable  circle  of  the  ideas  of  His  time ;  He 
staked  much  on  the  coming  of  the  new  kingdom  which 
did  not  appear  either  when  or  as  He  had  first  expected 
it.  He  had  to  adjust,  as  do  we  all,  His  life  to  His  experi- 

142 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

ence,  His  destiny  to  His  fate.  But  when  He  was  hanging 
on  His  cross,  forgotten  of  men  and  apparently  deserted 
by  His  God,  something  in  Him  that  had  nothing  to  do 
with  nature  or  the  brute  rose  to  a  final  expression  and 
by  its  more-than-natural  reality,  sealed  and  authenticated 
His  life.  Looking  down  upon  His  torturers,  understanding 
them  far  better  than  they  understood  themselves,  He  cried, 
"Father,  forgive  them,  for  they  know  not  what  they  do." 
That  cry  has  no  place  in  nature ;  it  has  no  application  and 
no  meaning  outside  the  human  heart  and  that  which  is 
above,  not  beneath,  the  human  heart,  from  which  it  is  de- 
rived. There,  then,  again  was  the  supernatural  law ;  there  > 
was  the  more-than-nature  in  man  which  makes  nature  ' 
into  human  nature;  and  there  is  the  thing  to  whose 
discovery,  cultivation,  expression,  real  preaching  is 
addressed.  Every  time  a  man  truly  preaches  he  so  por- 
trays what  men  ought  to  be,  must  be,  and  can  be  if  they 
will,  that  they  know  there  is  something  here 

"that  leaps  life's  narrow  bars 
To  claim  its  birthright  with  the  hosts  of  heaven! 

A  seed  of  sunshine  that  doth  leaven 
Our  earthly  dullness  with  the  beams  of  stars, 

And  glorify  our  clay 
With  light  from  fountains  elder  than  the  Day."1 

Such  preaching  is  a  perpetual  refutation  of  and  rebuke 
to  the  naturalism  and  imperialism  of  our  present  so- 
ciety. It  is  the  call  to  the  absolute  in  man,  to  a  clear  issue 
with  evil.  It  would  not  cry  peace,  peace,  when  there  is  no 
peace.  It  would  be  living  and  active,  and  sharper  than  any 
two-edged  sword,  piercing  even  to  the  dividing  of  both 
1  J.  R.  Lowell,  Commemoration  Ode,  stanza  IV,  11.  30-35. 

143 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

joints  and  marrow,  quick  to  discern  the  thoughts  and  in- 
tents of  the  heart. 

Following  this  insistence  upon  the  difference  from  na- 
ture, the  more-than-natural  in  man,  the  second  thing  in 
religious  preaching  will  have  to  be,  obviously,  the  mes- 
sage of  salvation.  That  is  to  say,  reducing  the  statement 
to  its  lowest  terms,  if  man  is  to  live  by  such  a  law,  the 
law  of  more-than-nature,  then  he  must  have  something 
also  more-than-human  to  help  him  in  his  task.  He  will 
need  strength  from  outside.  Indeed,  because  religion  de- 
clares that  there  is  such  divine  assistance,  and  that  faith 
can  command  it,  is  the  chief  cause  and  reason  for  our 
existence.  When  we  cease  to  preach  salvation  in  some 
form  or  other,  we  deny  our  own  selves ;  we  efface  our 
own  existence.  For  no  one  can  preach  the  more-than-hu- 
man in  mankind  without  emphasizing  those  elements  of 
free  will,  moral  responsibility,  the  need  and  capacity  for 
struggle  and  holiness  in  human  life  which  it  indicates, 
and  which  in  every  age  have  been  a  part  of  the  message 
of  Him  who  said,  "Be  ye  therefore  perfect,  even  as  your 
Father,  which  is  in  heaven,  is  perfect." 

Therefore,  as  we  have  previously  corrected  the  half 
truth  of  the  naturalist  who  makes  a  caricature,  not  a 
portrait  of  man,  we  must  now  in  the  same  way  turn  to 
the  correcting  of  the  humanist's  emphasis  upon  man's 
native  capacity  and  insist  upon  the  complementary  truth 
which  fulfills  this  moral  heroism  of  mankind,  namely,  the 
divine  rescue  which  answers  to  its  inadequacy.  Man  must 
struggle  for  his  victory ;  he  can  win ;  he  cannot  win  alone. 
We  must  then  insist  upon  the  doctrine  of  salvation,  turn- 
ing ourselves  to  the  other  side  of  the  humanist's  picture. 
Man  cannot  live  by  this  more-than-natural  law  unaided. 
For  not  only  has  he  the  power  to  rise  above  Nature ;  the 

144 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

same  thing  gives  him  equal  capacity  to  sink  beneath  her, 
and,  when  left  to  himself,  he  generally  does  so.  The 
preacher  does  not  dare  deny  the  sovereignty  of  sin.  Hu- 
manism hates  the  very  name  of  sin;  it  has  never  made  any 
serious  attempt  to  explain  the  consciousness  of  guilt. 
Neither  naturalist  nor  humanist  can  afford  to  admit  sin, 
for  sin  takes  man,  as  holiness  does,  outside  the  iron  chain 
of  cause  and  effect ;  it  breaks  the  law ;  it  is  not  strictly  nat- 
ural. It  makes  clear  enough  that  man  is  outside  the  nat- 
ural order  in  two  ways.  He  is  both  inferior  and  superior 
to  it.  He  falls  beneath,  he  rises  above  it.  When  he  acts 
like  a  beast,  he  is  not  clean  and  beastly,  but  unclean  and 
bestial.  When  he  lifts  his  head  in  moral  anguish,  bathes 
all  his  spirit  in  the  flood  of  awe  and  repentance,  is  trans- 
figured with  the  glorious  madness  of  self-sacrifice,  he  is 
so  many  worlds  higher  than  the  beast  that  their  rela- 
tionship becomes  irrelevant.  So  we  must  deal  more  com- 
pletely than  humanists  do  with  the  central  mystery  of 
our  experience;  man's  impotent  idealism,  his  insight  not 
matched  with  consummation ;  the  fact  that  what  he  dares 
to  dream  of  he  is  not  able  alone  to  do. 

For  the  humanist  exalts  man,  which  is  good ;  but  then 
he  makes  him  self-sufficient  for  the  struggle  which  such 
exaltation  demands,  which  is  bad.  In  that  partial  under- 
standing he  departs  from  truth.  And  what  is  it  that  makes 
the  futility  of  so  much  present  preaching?  It  is  the  ac- 
ceptance of  this  doctrine  of  man's  moral  adequacy  and 
consequently  the  almost  total  lack  either  of  the  assurance 
of  grace  or  of  the  appeal  to  the  will.  No  wonder  such 
exhortations  cannot  stem  the  tide  of  an  ever  increasing 
.  worldliness.  Such  preaching  stimulates  the  mind ;  in  both 
the  better  and  the  worse  preachers,  it  moves  the  emo- 
tions; but  it  gives  men  little  power  to  act  on  what  they 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

hear  and  feel  to  the  transformation  of  their  daily  exist- 
ence. Thus  the  humanistic  sense  of  man's  sufficiency, 
coupled  with  the  inherent  distrust  of  any  notion  of  help 
from  beyond  and  above,  any  belief  in  a  reinforcing  power 
which  a  critical  rationalism  cannot  dissect  and  explain, 
has  gradually  ruled  out  of  court  the  doctrine  of  salvation 
until  the  preacher's  power,  both  to  experience  and  to 
transmit  it,  has  atrophied  through  disuse. 

Who  can  doubt  that  one  large  reason  why  crude  and 
indefensible  concepts  of  the  Christian  faith  have  such  a 
disconcerting  vitality  today  is  because  they  carry,  in  their 
outmoded,  unethical,  discredited  forms,  the  truth  of 
man's  insufficiency  in  himself  and  the  confident  assur- 
ance of  that  something  coming  from  without  which  will 
abundantly  complete  the  struggling  life  within?  They 
offer  the  assurance  of  that  peace  and  moral  victory  which 
man  so  ardently  desires,  because  they  declare  that  it  is  both 
a  discovery  and  a  revelation,  an  achievement  and  a  rescue. 
There  are  vigorous  and  rapidly  growing  popular  move- 
ments of  the  day  which  rest  their  summation  of  faith  on 
the  quadrilateral  of  an  inerrant  and  verbally  inspired 
Scripture,  the  full  deity  of  Jesus  Christ,  the  efficacy  of 
His  substitutionary  atonement,  the  speedy  second  coming 
of  the  Lord.  No  sane  person  can  suppose  that  these  cults 
succeed  because  of  the  ethical  insight,  the  spiritual  sen- 
sitiveness, the  intellectual  integrity  of  such  a  message.  It 
does  not  possess  these  things.  They  succeed,  in  spite  of 
their  obscurantism,  because  they  do  confess  and  meet 
man's  central  need,  his  need  to  be  saved.  The  power  of 
that  fact  is  what  is  able  to  carry  so  narrow  and  so  in- 
defensible a  doctrine. 

So  the  second  problem  of  the  preacher  is  clear.  Man 
asserts  his  potential  independence  of  the  natural  law. 

146 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

But  to  realize  that,  he  must  bridge  the  gulf  between  him- 
self and  the  supernatural  lawgiver  to  whose  dictates  he 
confesses  he  is  subject.  He  is  not  free  from  the  bondage  -, 
of  the  lower,  except  through  the  bondage  to  the  higher.   | 
Nor  can  he  live  by  that  higher  law  unaided  and  alone. 
Here  we  strike  at  the  root  of  humanism.  Its  kindly  tol- 
erance of  the  church  is  built  up  on  the  proud  conviction 
that  we,  with  our  distinctive  doctrine  of  salvation,  are 
superfluous,  hence  sometimes  disingenuous  and  always 
negligible.    The    humanist    believes    that    understanding! 
takes  the  place  of  faith.  What  men  need  is  not  to  be  re-  \ 
deemed  from  their  sins,  but  to  be  educated  out  of  their 
follies. 

But  does  right  knowing  in  itself  suffice  to  insure  right 
doing?  Socrates  and  Plato,  with  their  indentifica- 
tion  of  knowledge  and  virtue,  would  appear  to  think  so ; 
the  church  has  gone  a  long  way,  under  humanistic  pres- 
sure, in  tacit  acquiescence  with  their  doctrine.  Yet  most 
of  us,  judging  alike  from  internal  and  personal  evidence 
and  from  external  and  social  observation,  would  say  that 
there  was  no  sadder  or  more  universal  experience  than 
that  of  the  failure  of  right  knowledge  to  secure  right  per- 
formance. Right  knowledge  is  not  in  itself  right  living. 
We  have  striking  testimony  on  that  point  from  one  of 
the  greatest  of  all  humanists,  no  less  a  person  than  Con- 
fucius. "At  seventy,"  he  says,  "I  could  follow  what  my 
heart  desired  without  transgressing  the  law  of  meas- 
ure."1 The  implication  of  such  testimony  makes  no  very 
good  humanistic  apologetic !  Most  of  us,  when  desire  has 
failed,  can  manage  to  attain,  unaided,  the  identification 
of  understanding  and  conduct,  can  climb  to  the  poor 
heights  of  a  worn-out  and  withered  continence.  But  one 

1  Analects,  II,  civ. 

147 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

wonders  a  little  whether,  then,  the  climbing  seems  to  be 
worth  while. 

But  the  doctrine  usually  begins  by  minimizing  the  free 
agency  of  the  individual,  playing  up  the  factors  of  com- 
pulsion, either  of  circumstance  or  inheritance  or  of  ig- 
norance, as  being  in  themselves  chiefly  responsible  for 
blameful  acts.  These  are  therefore  considered  involun- 
tary and  certain  to  be  reformed  when  man  knows  better 
and  has  the  corresponding  strength  of  his  knowledge. 
But  Aristotle,  who  deals  with  this  Socratic  doctrine  in  the 
third  book  of  the  Ethics,  very  sensibly  remarks,  "It  is 
ridiculous  to  lay  the  blame  of  our  wrong  actions  upon  ex- 
ternal causes  rather  than  upon  the  facility  with  which  we 
ourselves  are  caught  by  such  causes,  and,  while  we  take 
credit  for  our  noble  actions  to  ourselves,  lay  the  blame 
of  our  shameful  actions  upon  pleasure."1  "The  facility 
with  which  we  are  caught" — there  is  the  religious  under- 
standing; there  is  that  perversion  of  will  which  conspires 
with  the  perils  and  chances  of  the  world  so  that  together 
they  may  undo  the  soul. 

Of  course,  as  Aristotle  admits,  there  is  this  half  truth 
lying  at  the  root  of  the  Socratic  identification  of  virtue 
and  knowledge  that  every  vicious  person  is  ignorant  of 
what  he  ought  to  do  and  what  he  ought  to  abstain  from 
doing  in  the  sense  that  what  he  is  about  to  do  could  not 
be  defended  upon  any  ground  of  enlightened  self-in- 
terest. And  so,  while  he  finds  sin  sweet  and  evil  pleasant, 
these  are  delusive  experiences,  which,  if  he  saw  life 
steadily  and  whole,  he  would  know  as  such.  But  one 
reason  for  this  ignorance  is  unwillingness  to  know.  Good 
men  do  evil,  and  understanding  men  sin,  partly  because 
they  are  misled  by  false  ideas,  partly,  also,  because,  know- 

1  Ethics,  Book  III,  ch.  ii,  p.  61. 

148 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

ing  them  false,  they  cannot  or  will  not  give  them  up.  This 
is  what  Goethe  very  well  understood  when  he  said,  "Most 
men  prefer  error  to  truth,  because  truth  imposes  limita- 
tions and  error  does  not." 

And  another  reason  is  that  when  men  do  know,  they 
find  a  deadly  and  mysterious,  a  sort  of  perverted  joy — a 
sweet  and  terrible  and  secret  delight, — in  denying  their 
own  understanding.  Thus  right  living  calls  for  a  repeated 
and  difficult  exercise  of  the  will,  what  Professor  Babbitt 
calls  "a  pulling  back  of  the  impulse  to  the  track  that 
knowledge  indicates."  Such  moral  mastery  is  not  identi- 
cal with  moral  perception  and  most  frequently  is  not  its 
accompaniment,  unless  observation  and  experience  are 
alike  fallacious.  Thus  the  whole  argument  falls  to  the 
ground  when  we  confess  that  possession  of  knowledge 
does  not  guarantee  the  application  of  it.  Therefore  the 
two  things,  knowledge  and  virtue,  according  to  universal 
experience,  are  not  identical.  Humanists  indeed  use  the 
word  "knowledge"  for  the  most  part  in  an  esoteric  sense. 
Knowledge  is  virtue  in  the  sense  that  it  enables  us  to  see 
virtue  as  excellent  and  desirable;  it  is  not  virtue  in  the 
sense  that  it  alone  enables  us  to  acquire  it. 

Who,  indeed,  that  has  ever  lived  in  the  far  country 
does  not  know  that  one  factor  in  its  fascination  was  a 
bittersweet  awareness  of  the  folly,  the  inevitable  disaster, 
of  such  alien  surroundings.  Who  also  does  not  know  that 
often  when  the  whole  will  is  set  to  identify  conduct  with 
conviction,  it  may  be,  for  all  its  passionate  and  bitter  sin- 
cerity, set  in  vain.  In  every  hour  of  every  day  there  are 
hundreds  of  lives  that  battle  honestly,  but  with  decreas- 
ing spiritual  forces,  with  passion  and  temptation.  Some- 
times a  life  is  driven  by  the  fierce  gales  of  enticement, 
the  swift  currents  of  desire,  right  upon  the  jagged  rock 

149 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

of  some  great  sin.  Lives  that  have  seemed  strong  and 
fair  go  down  every  day,  do  they  not,  and  shock  us  for  a 
moment  with  their  irremediable  catastrophe?  And  we 
must  not  forget  that  before  they  went  down,  for  many  a 
month  or  even  year  they  have  been  hard  beset  lives.  Be- 
fore that  final  and  complete  ruin,  they  have  been  drift- 
ing and  struggling,  driven  and  fighting,  sin  drawing 
nearer  and  nearer,  their  fated  lives  urged  on,  the  mind 
growing  darker,  the  stars  in  their  souls  going  out,  the 
steering  of  their  own  lives  taken  from  their  hands.  Then 
there  has  been  the  sense  of  the  coming  danger,  the  dark 
presentiment  of  how  it  all  must  end»when  the  "powers 
that  tend  the  soul  to  help  it  from  the  death  that  cannot  die, 
and  save  it  even  in  extremes,  begin  to  vex  and  plague  it." 
There  has  been  the  dreadful  sense  of  life  drifting  toward 
a  great  crash,  nearer  and  nearer  to  what  must  be  the 
wreck  of  all  things.  What  does  the  humanist  have  to  offer 
to  these  men  and  women  who  know  perfectly  well  where 
they  are,  and  what  they  are  about,  and  where  they  would 
like  to  be,  but  who  can't  get  there  and  who  are,  today  and 
every  day,  putting  forth  their  last  and  somber  efforts, 
trying  in  vain  to  just  keep  clear  of  ruin  until  the  dark- 
ness and  the  helplessness  shall  lift  and  something  or 
someone  shall  give  them  peace ! 

Now,  it  is  this  defect  in  the  will  which  automatically 
limits  the  power  of  the.,  intellect.  It  is  this  which  the  So- 
cratic  identification  ignores.  So  while  we  might  readily 
grant  that  it  is  in  the  essential  nature  of  things  that  vir- 
tue and  truth,  wisdom  and  character,  understanding  and 
goodness,  are  but  two  aspects  of  one  thing,  is  it  not  tri- 
fling with  one  of  the  most  serious  facts  of  human  des- 
tiny to  interpret  the  truism  to  mean  that,  when  a  man 
knows  that  a  contemplated  act  is  wrong  or  foolish  or 

150 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

ugly,  he  is  thereby  restrained  from  accomplishing  it? 
Knowledge  is  not  virtue  in  the  sense  that  mere  reason  \S* 
or  mere  perception  can  control  the  will.  And  this  is  the 
conclusion  that  Aristotle  also  comes  to  when  he  says : 
"Some  people  say  that  incontinence  is  impossible,  if  one 
has  knowledge.  It  seems  to  them  strange,  as  it  did  to 
Socrates,  that  where  knowledge  exists  in  man,  something 
else  should  master  it  and  drag  it  about  like  a  slave.  Soc- 
rates was  wholly  opposed  to  this  idea ;  he  denied  the  ex- 
istence of  incontinence,  arguing  that  nobody  with  a  con- 
ception of  what  was  best  could  act  against  it,  and 
therefore,  if  he  did  so  act,  his  action  must  be  due  to  ig- 
norance." And  then  Aristotle  adds,  "The  theory  is  evi-  ) 
dently  at  variance  with  the  facts  of  experience."1  Plato 
himself  exposes  the  theoretical  nature  of  the  assertion, 
its  inhuman  demand  upon  the  will,  the  superreasonable- 
ness~~wKich  it  expects  but  offers  no  way  of  obtaining,  - 
when  he  says,  "Every  one  will  admit  that  a  nature  hav- 
ing in  perfection  all  the  qualities  which  are  required  in 
a  philosopher  is  a  rare  plant  seldom  seen  among  men."2 

It  would  be  well  if  those  people  who  are  going  about 
the  world  today  teaching  social  hygiene  to  adolescents 
(on  the  whole  an  admirable  thing  to  do)  but  proceeding 
on  the  assumption  that  when  youth  knows  what  is  right 
and  what  is  wrong,  and  why  it  is  right  and  why  it  is 
wrong,  and  what  are  the  consequences  of  right  and 
wrong,  that  then,  ipso  facto,  youth  will  become  chaste, — 
well  if  they  would  acquaint  themselves  either  with  the 
ethics  of  Aristotle  or  with  the  Christian  doctrine  of  sal- 
vation. For  if  men  think  that  knowledge  by  itself  ever 
yet  produced  virtue  in  eager  and  unsated  lives,  they  are 

1  Ethics,  Book  VII,  ch.  iii,  pp.  206-207. 

2  Republic,  VI,  491. 


-PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

either  knaves  or  fools.  They  will  find  that  knowledge  un- 
controlled by  a  purified  spirit  and  a  reinforced  will  is 
already  teaching  men  not  how  to  be  good,  but  how  to  sin 
the  more  boldly  with  the  better  chance  of  physical  im- 
punity. "Philosophy,"  says  Black,  "is  a  feeble  antagonist 
before  passion,  because  it  does  not  supply  an  adequate 
motive  for  the  conflict."1  There  were  few  men  in  the 
nineteenth  century  in  whom  knowledge  and  virtue  were 
more  profoundly  and  completely  joined  than  in  John 
Henry  Newman.  But  did  that  subtle  intellect  suffice? 
could  it  make  the  scholar  into  the  saint?  Hear  his  own 
words : 

"  O  Holy  Lord,  who  with  the  children  three 

Didst  walk  the  piercing  flame ; 
Help,  in  those  trial  hours  which,  save  to  Thee, 

I  dare  not  name ; 

Nor  let  these  quivering  eyes  and  sickening  heart 
Crumble  to  dust  beneath  the  tempter's  dart. 

"  Thou  who  didst  once  Thy  life  from  Mary's  breast 

Renew  from  day  to  day; 
O  might  her  smile,  severely  sweet,  but  rest 

On  this  frail  clay ! 
Till  I  am  Thine  with  my  whole  soul,  and  fear 

Not  feel,  a  secret  joy,  that  Hell  is  near." 

So,  only  when  we  include  in  the  term  "knowledge"  under- 
standing plus  good  will,  is  the  humanist  position  true,  and 
this,  I  suppose,  is  what  Aristotle  meant  when  he  finally 
says,  "Vice  is  consistent  with  knowledge  of  some  kind, 
but  it  excludes  knowledge  in  the  full  and  proper  sense  of 
the  word."2 

1  Culture  and  Restraint,  p.  104. 

2  Ethics,  Book  VII,  ch.  v,  p.  215. 

152 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

Now,  so  finespun  a  discussion  of  intricate  and  psy- 
chological subtleties  is  mildly  interesting  presumably  to 
middle-aged  scholars,  but  I  submit  that  a  half  truth  that 
needs  so  much  explanation  and  so  many  admissions  be- 
fore it  can  be  made  safe  or  actual,  is  a  rather  dangerous 
thing  to  offer  to  adolescence  or  to  a  congregation  of  av- 
erage men  and  women.  It  cannot  sound  to  them  very 
much  like  the  good  news  of  Jesus.  Culture  is  a  precious 
thing,  but  no  culture,  without  the  help  of  divine  grace 
and  the  responsive  affection  on  our  part  which  that  grace 
induces,  will  ever  knit  men  together  in  a  kingdom  of 
God,  a  spiritual  society.  As  long  ago  as  the  second  cen- 
tury Celsus  understood  that.  He  says  in  his  polemic 
against  Christianity,  as  quoted  by  Origen,  "If  any  one 
suppose  that  it  is  possible  that  the  people  of  Asia  and 
Europe  and  Africa,  Greeks  and  barbarians,  should  agree 
to  follow  one  law,  he  is  hopelessly  ignorant."1  Now,  Cel- 
sus was  proceeding  .on  the  assumption  that  Christianity 
was  only  another  philosophy,  a  new  intellectual  system, 
and  he  was  merely  exposing  the  futility  of  all  such  un- 
aided intellectualism. 

It  is,  therefore,  of  prime  importance  for  the  preacher 
to  remember  that  humanism,  or  any  other  doctrine  which 
approaches  the  problem  of  life  and  conduct  other  than  by 
moral  and  spiritual  means,  can  never  take  the  place  of 
the  religious  appeal,  because  it  does  not  touch  the  springs 
of  action  where  motives  are  born  and  from  which  con- 
victions arise.  You  do  not  make  a  man  moral  by  enlight- 
ening him ;  it  is  nearer  the  truth  to  say  that  you  enlighten 
him  when  you  make  him  moral.  "Blessed  are  the  pure 
-in  heart,"  said  Jesus,  "for  they  shall  see  God.  If  any  man 
wills  to  do  the  will,  he  shall  know  the  doctrine."  Educa- 

1  Origen,  contra  Celsum,  VIII,  p.  72. 

153 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

tion  does  not  wipe  out  crime  nor  an  understanding  mind 
make  a  holy  will.  The  last  half  of  the  nineteenth  century 
made  it  terribly  clear  that  the  learning  and  science  of  man- 
kind, where  they  are  divorced  from  piety,  unconsecrated 
by  a  spiritual  passion,  and  largely  directed  by  selfish  mo- 
tives, can  neither  benefit  nor  redeem  the  race.  Consider 
for  a  moment  the  enormous  expansion  of  knowledge 
which  the  world  has  witnessed  since  the  year  1859.  What 
prodigious  accessions  to  the  sum  of  our  common  under- 
standing have  we  seen  in  the  natural  and  the  humane 
sciences ;  and  what  marvelous  uses  of  scientific  knowl- 
edge for  practical  purposes  have  we  discovered!  We 
have  mastered  in  these  latter  days  a  thousand  secrets  of 
nature.  We  have  freed  the  mind  from  old  ignorance  and 
ancient  superstition.  We  have  penetrated  the  secrets  of 
the  body,  and  can  almost  conquer  death  and  indefinitely 
prolong  the  span  of  human  days.  We  face  the  facts  and 
know  the  world  as  our  fathers  could  never  do.  We  un- 
derstand the  past  and  foresee  the  future.  But  the  most 
significant  thing  about  our  present  situation  is  this :  how 
little  has  this  wisdom,  in  and  of  itself,  done  for  us!  It 
has  made  men  more  cunning  rather  than  more  noble.  Still 
the  body  is  ravaged  and  consumed  by  passion.  Still  men 
toil  for  others  against  their  will,  and  the  strong  spill  the 
blood  of  the  weak  for  their  ambition  and  the  sweat  of  the 
children  for  their  greed.  Never  was  learning  so  diffused 
nor  the  content  of  scholarship  so  large  as  now.  Yet  the 
great  cities  are  as  Babylon  and  Rome  of  old,  where  hu- 
man wreckage  multiplies,  and  hideous  vices  flourish,  and 
men  toil  without  expectancy,  and  live  without  hope,  and 
millions  exist — not  live  at  all — from  hand  to  mouth.  As 
we  survey  the  universal  unrest  of  the  world  today  and 
see  the  horrors  of  war  between  nation  and  nation,  and 

154 


GRACE,  KNOWLEDGE,  VIRTUE 

between  class  and  class,  it  would  not  be  difficult  to  make 
out  a  case  for  the  thesis  that  the  scientific  and  intellectual 
advances  of  the  nineteenth  century  have  largely  worked 
to  make  men  keener  and  more  capacious  in  their  suffer- 
ing. And  at  least  this  is  true ;  just  so  far  as  the  achieve- 
ment of  the  mind  has  been  divorced  from  the  consecra- 
tion of  the  spirit,  in  just  so  far  knowledge  has  had  no 
beneficent  potency  for  the  human  race. 

Is  it  not  clear,  then,  that  preaching  must  deal  again, 
never  more  indeed  than  now,  with  the  religion  which 
offers  a  redemption  from  sin?  This  is  still  foolishness  to 
the  Greeks,  but  to  those  who  believe  it  is  still  the  power 
of  God  unto  salvation.  Culture  is  not  religion.  When  the 
preacher  substitutes  the  one  for  the  other,  he  gives  stones 
for  bread,  and  the  hungry  sheep  go  elsewhere  or  are  not 
fed.  It  is  this  emasculated  preaching,  mulcted  of  its  spirit- 
ual forces,  which  awakes  the  bitterest  distrust  and  deep- 
est indignation  that  human  beings  know.  They  are  fight- 
ing the  foes  of  the  flesh  and  the  enemies  of  the  spirit, 
enduring  the  slings  and  arrows  of  outrageous  fortune, 
standing  by  the  open  graves  of  their  friends  and  kindred, 
saying  there,  "I  shall  go  to  him,  but  he  shall  not  return  to 
me."  And  then,  with  all  this  mystery  and  oppression  of 
life  upon  them  they  enter  the  doors  of  the  house  of  God 
and  listen  to  a  polite  essay,  are  told  of  the  consolations  of 
art,  reminded  of  the  stupidity  of  evil,  assured  of  the  un- 
reality of  sin,  offered  the  subtle  satisfactions  of  a  culti- 
vated intelligence.  In  just  so  far  as  they  are  genuine  men 
and  women,  they  resent  such  preaching  as  an  insult,  a 
mockery  and  an  offense.  No,  no;  something  more  is 
needed  than  the  humanist  can  offer  for  those  who  are 
hard-pressed  participants  in  the  stricken  fields  of  life. 

Religious    preaching,    then,    begins    with    these    two 

155 


things :  man's  solitary  place  in  nature,  man's  inability  to 
hold  that  place  alone.  Hence  two  more  things  are  neces- 
sary as  essentials  of  great  preaching  in  a  pagan  day.  The 
clear  proclamation  of  the  superhuman  God,  the  tran- 
scendent spirit  who  is  able  to  control  and  reinforce  the 
spirit  of  man,  and  the  setting  forth  of  some  way  or  some 
mediator,  through  whom  man  may  meet  and  touch  that 
Spirit  so  far  removed  yet  so  infinitely  near  and  dear  to 
him.  It  is  with  these  matters  that  we  shall  be  occupied  in 
the  next  chapter. 


156 


CHAPTER  SIX 
The  Almighty  and  Everlasting  God 

IF  the  transcendent  element  in  man  which  endows 
him  with  the  proud  if  tragic  sense  of  personality 
is  the  first  message  of  the  preacher  to  a  chattering 
and  volatile  world,  and  the  second  is  the  setting  forth  of 
what  this  endowment  demands  and  how  pitiably  man 
fails  to  meet  it,  then  the  third  message  is  of  the  Rock 
that  is  higher  than  he,  even  inclusive  of  his  all,  in  whose 
composed  and  comprehensive  Being  his  baffled  and  di- 
vided person  may  be  gathered  up,  brought  to  its  own  con- 
summation of  self.  The  rivers  that  pour  tumultuously  to 
their  ocean  bed,  the  ascending  fire  ever  falling  backward 
but  leaping  upward  to  the  sun,  are  poor  figures  to  ex- 
press the  depth  and  irresistible  urge  of  the  passion  in 
man  for  completeness,  for  repose,  for  power,  for  self- 
perception  in  self-expression,  for  victory  and  the  attain- 
ment of  the  end.  Conscious  and  divided  spirit  that  he  is, 
man  turns  away,  sooner  or  later,  with  utter  weariness 
and  self-disgust  from  the  nature  which  pleases  him  by 
betraying  him,  which  maims  his  person  that  he  may  en- 
joy his  senses,  and  reaches  out  after  the  other-worldly, 
the  supernatural,  the  invisible  and  eternal  Hope  and 
Home  of  the  Soul. 

Humanism  which  bids  men  sufficiently  find  God  within 
themselves,  if  they  think  they  need  to  find  Him  at  all, 
seems  not  to  comprehend  this  passion  of  pride  and  hu- 

157 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

mility,  this  inner  perception  of  the  futility  and  the  blun- 
der of  the  self-contained  life.  Life  is  so  obviously  not 
worth  its  brevity,  its  suffering,  its  withheld  conclusions, 
its  relative  insignificance,  if  it  must  thus  stand  alone.  All 
that  can  save  it,  preserve  to  it  worth  and  dignity,  main- 
tain its  self-respect  and  mastery,  is  to  find  that  abundant 
power  without  which  confesses,  certifies  and  seals  the 
divinity  within. 

How  foredoomed  to  failure,  then,  especially  in  an  age 
when  men  are  surmounting  life  by  placating  it,  enjoying 
it  by  being  easy  with  themselves — how  foredoomed  to 
failure  is  the  preaching  which  continues  in  the  world  of 
religion  this  exaltation  of  human  sufficiency  and  natural 
values,  domesticating  them  within  the  church.  It  is  to 
laugh  to  see  them  there!  It  means  so  transparent  a  sur- 
render, so  pitiable  a  confession  of  defeat.  If  anything 
can  bring  the  natural  man  into  the  sanctuary  it  is  that 
there  he  has  to  bring  his  naturalness  to  the  bar  of  a  more- 
than-natural  standard.  If  he  comes  at  all,  it  will  not  be 
for  entertainment  and  expansion  but  because  there  we  in- 
sist on  reverence  and  restraint.  If  church  and  preacher 
offer  only  a  pietized  and  decorous  naturalism,  when  he 
can  get  the  real  thing  in  naked  and  unashamed  brutality 
without;  if  they  offer  him  only  another  form  of  human- 
istic living,  he  will  stay  away.  Such  preaching  is  as  bore- 
some  as  it  is  unnecessary.  Such  exercise  of  devotion  is 
essentially  superfluous  and  a  rather  humorous  imposition 
upon  the  world.  The  only  thing  that  will  ever  bring  the 
natural  man  to  listen  to  preaching  is  when  it  insists  upon 
something  more-than-the-natural  and  calls  him  to  ac- 
count regarding  it ;  when  it  speaks  of  something  different 
and  better  for  him  than  this  world  and  what  it  can  offer. 
"Take  my  yoke  upon  you"  is  the  attractive  invitation, 

158 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

"make  inner  obeisance  and  outward  obedience  to  some- 
thing higher  than  thy  poor  self." 

It  is  clear,  then,  that  these  observations  have  a  bearing 
upon  our  preaching  of  the  doctrine  of  God.  There  is  a 
certain  illogicality,  something  humorous,  in  going  into  a 
church,  of  all  places  in  the  world,  to  be  told  how  like  we 
are  to  Him.  The  dull  and  average  personality,  the  ordi- 
nary and  not  very  valuable  man,  can  probably  listen  in- 
differently and  with  a  slow-growing  hardness  and  dim  re- 
sentment to  that  sort  of  preaching  for  a  number  of  years. 
But  the  valuable,  the  highly  personalized  people,  the 
saints  and  the  sinners,  the  great  rebels  and  the  great  dis- 
ciples, who  are  the  very  folk  for  whom  the  church  exists, 
would  hate  it,  and  they  would  know  the  final  bitterness 
of  despair  if  they  thought  that  this  was  so.  Either  saint 
or  sinner  would  consider  it  the  supreme  insult,  the  last 
pitch  of  insolence,  for  the  church  to  be  telling  them  that 
it  is  true. 

For  they  know  within  themselves  that  it  is  a  lie.  Their 
one  hope  hangs  on  God  because  His  thoughts  are  not 
their  thoughts,  nor  His  ways  their  ways ;  because  He 
seeth  the  end  from  the  beginning;  because  in  Him  there 
is  no  variableness,  neither  shadow  that  is  caused  by  turn- 
ing; because  no  man  shall  see  His  face  and  live.  They, 
the  sinners  and  the  saints,  do  not  want  to  be  told  that 
they,  within  themselves,  can  heal  themselves  and  that  sin 
has  no  real  sinfulness.  That  is  tempting  them  to  the  final 
denial,  the  last  depth  of  betrayal,  the  blurring  of  moral 
values,  the  calling  of  evil  good  and  the  saying  that  good 
is  evil.  They  know  that  this  is  the  unpardonable  madness. 
In  the  hours  when  they,  the  saints  and  sinners,  wipe  their 
mouths  and  say,  "We  have  done  no  harm" ;  in  the  days 
when  what  they  love  is  ugliness  because  it  is  ugly  and 

159 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

shameless,  and  reckless  expression  because  it  is  so  terri- 
ble, so  secretly  appalling,  so  bittersweet  with  the  sweet- 
ness of  death,  they  know  that  it  is  the  last  affront  to  have 
the  church — the  one  place  where  men  expect  they  will  be 
made  to  face  the  facts — bow  these  facts  out  of  doors. 

No,  we  readily  grant  that  the  religious  approach  to  the 
whole  truth  and  to  final  reality  is  like  any  other  one, 
either  scientific,  economic,  political,  a  partial  approach. 
It  sets  forth  for  the  most  part  only  a  group  of  facts. 
When  it  does  not  emphasize  other  facts,  it  does  not 
thereby  deny  them.  But  it  insists  that  the  truth  of  man's 
differences,  man's  helplessness  which  the  differences  re- 
veal, and  man's  fate  hanging  therefore  upon  a  transcend- 
ent God,  are  the  key  truths  for  the  religious  life.  It  is 
with  that  aspect  of  life  the  preacher  deals,  and  if  he  fails 
to  grapple  with  these  problems  and  considerations,  ig- 
nores these  facts,  his  candlestick  has  been  removed. 

The  argument  for  a  God,  then,  within  His  world,  but 
also  distinct  from  it,  above  its  evil  custom  and  in  some 
sense  untouched  by  its  all-leveling  life,  is  essential  to  the 
preservation  of  human  personality,  and  personality  is 
essential  to  dignity,  to  decency,  to  hope.  The  clearest  and 
simplest  thing  to  be  said  about  the  Hebrew  God,  lofty 
and  inaccessible  Being,  with  whom  nevertheless  His  puri- 
fied and  obedient  children  might  have  relationships,  or 
about  the  "living  God"  of  Greek  theology,  far  removed 
from  us  but  with  whose  deathless  goodness,  beauty  and 
truth  our  mortality  by  some  mediator  may  be  endowed,  is 
that  the  argument  that  supports  such  transcendence  is  the 
argument  from  necessity.  It  is  the  facts  of  experience,  the 
very  stuff  of  human  life,  coming  down  alike  from  He- 
braic and  Hellenic  civilization,  which  demand  Him.  Im- 
manence and  transcendence  are  merely  theistic  terms  for 

1 60 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

identity  and  difference.  Through  them  is  revealed  and 
discovered  personality,  the  "I"  which  is  the  ultimate  fact 
of  my  consciousness.  I  can  but  reckon  from  the  known 
to  the  unknown.  The  world  which  produced  me  is  also, 
then,  a  cosmic  identity  and  difference.  In  that  double  fact 
is  found  divine  personality.  But  that  aspect  of  His  Per- 
son, that  portion  of  the  fact  which  feeds  the  imaginative 
and  volitional  life,  is  the  glorious  and  saving  unlikeness  of 
God — His  unthinkable  and  inexpressible  glory ;  His  utter 
comprehension  and  unbelievable  compassion;  His  justice 
which  knows  no  flaw  and  brooks  no  evasion  and  cannot 
be  swerved ;  His  power  which  may  not  be  withstood  and 
hence  is  a  sure  and  certain  tenderness ;  His  hatred  of  sin, 
terrible  and  flaming,  a  hatred  which  will  send  sinful  men 
through  a  thousand  hells,  if  they  will  have  them,  and  can 
only  be  saved  thereby;  His  love  for  men,  which  is  what 
makes  Him  hate  their  sin  and  leads  Him  by  His  very  na- 
ture as  God  to  walk  into  hell  with  the  sinner,  suffering 
with  him  a  thousand  times  more  than  the  sinner  is  able 
to  understand  or  know, — like  the  Paul  who  could  not  wish 
himself,  for  himself,  in  hell,  but  who  did  wish  himself 
accursed  of  God  for  his  brethren's  sake ;  like  Jesus,  who, 
in  Gethsemane,  would  for  Himself  avoid  His  cross,  but 
who  accepted  it  and  was  willing  to  hang,  forsaken  of 
God,  upon  it,  for  the  lives  of  men,  identifying  Himself 
to  the  uttermost  with  their  fate.  Yes ;  it  is  such  a  super- 
nal God — that  God  who  is  apart,  incredible,  awful — that 
the  soul  of  humanity  craves  and  needs. 

Of  course,  here  again,  as  throughout  these  discussions, 
we  are  returning  to  a  form  of  the  old  dualism.  We  can- 
not seem  to  help  it.  We  may  construct  philosophies  like 
Hegel's  in  which  thesis  and  antithesis  merge  in  a  higher 
synthesis;  we  may  use  the  dual  view  of  the  world  as 

161 


representing  only  a  stage,  a  present  achievement  in  cos- 
mic progress  or  human  understanding.  But  that  does  not 
alter  the  incontestable  witness  of  present  experience  that 
the  religious  consciousness  is  based  upon,  interwoven 
with,  the  sense  of  the  cosmic  division  without,  and  the 
unresolved  moral  dualism  within  the  individual  life.  It  is 
important  enough  to  remember,  however,  that  we  have 
rejected,  at  least  for  this  generation,  the  old  scholastic 
theologies  founded  on  this  general  experience.  Fashions 
of  thought  change  with  significant  facility ;  there  is  not 
much  of  the  Absolute  about  them !  Nevertheless  we  can- 
not think  with  forgotten  terms.  Therefore  ours  is  no 
mechanically  divided  world  where  man  and  God,  nature 
and  supernature,  soul  and  body,  belong  to  mutually  ex- 
clusive territories.  We  do  not  deny  the  principle  of  iden- 
tity. Hence  we  have  discarded  that  old  view  of  the  world 
and  all  the  elder  doctrines  of  an  absentee  creator,  a 
worthless  and  totally  depraved  humanity,  a  legalistic  or 
substitutionary  atonement,  a  magical  and  non-understand- 
able Incarnation  which  flowed  from  it.  But  we  are  not 
discarding  with  them  that  other  aspect  of  the  truth,  the 
principle  of  separateness,  nor  those  value  judgments,  that 
perpetual  vision  of  another  nature,  behind  and  beneath 
phenomena,  from  which  the  old  dualism  took  its  rise.  It 
is  the  form  which  it  assumed,  the  interpretation  of  ex- 
perience which  it  gave,  not  the  facts  themselves,  obscure 
but  stubborn  as  they  are,  which  it  confessed,  that  we  have 
dropped.  Identity  and  difference  are  still  here;  man  is  a 
part  of  his  world,  but  he  is  also  apart  from  it.  God  is  in 
nature  and  in  us;  God  is  without  and  other  than  nature 
and  most  awfully  something  other  than  us. 

Indeed,  the  precise  problem  of  the  preacher  today  is  to 
keep  the  old  supernatural  values  and  drop  the  old  vocab- 

162 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

ulary  with  the  philosophy  which  induced  it.  We  must 
acknowledge  the  universe  as  one,  and  yet  be  able  to  show 
that  the  He  or  the  It,  beyond  and  without  the  world,  is 
its  only  conceivable  beginning,  its  only  conceivable  end, 
the  chief  hope  of  its  brevity,  the  only  stay  of  its  ideal- 
ism. It  was  the  arbitrary  and  mechanical  completeness  of 
the  old  division,  not  the  reality  that  underlay  the  distinc- 
tion itself,  which  parted  company  with  truth  and  hence 
lost  the  allegiance  of  the  mind.  It  was  that  the  old  dual- 
ism tried  to  lock  up  this,  the  most  baffling  of  all  realities, 
in  a  formula, — that  was  what  undid  it.  But  we  shall  be 
equally  foolish  if  now,  in  the  interests  of  a  new  artificial 
clearness,  we  deny  another  portion  of  experience  just  as 
our  fathers  ignored  certain  other  facts  in  the  interests  of 
their  too  well-defined  systems.  We  cannot  hold  to  the  old 
world  view  which  would  bend  the  modern  mind  to  the 
support  of  an  inherited  interpretation  of  experience  and 
therefore  would  not  any  longer  really  explain  or  confirm 
it.  Neither  can  we  hold  new  views  which  mutilate  the 
experience  and  leave  out  some  of  the  most  precious  ele- 
ments in  it,  even  if  in  so  doing  we  should  simplify  the 
problem  for  the  mind.  It  would  be  an  unreal  simplifica- 
tion ;  it  would  darken,  not  illumine,  the  understanding ;  we 
should  never  rest  in  it.  Nor  do  we  need  to  be  concerned 
if  the  intellect  cannot  perfectly  order  or  easily  dem- 
onstrate the  whole  of  the  religious  life,  fit  each  element 
with  a  self -verify  ing  defense  and  explanation.  No  man 
of  the  world,  to  say  nothing  of  a  man  of  faith  or  imagi-i 
nation,  has  ever  yet  trusted  to  a  purely  intellectual  judg-| 
ment. 

•So  we  reject  the  old  dualism,  its  dichotomized  uni- 
verse, its  two  sorts  of  authority,  its  prodigious  and  arbi- 
trary supernaturalism.  But  we  do  not  reject  what  lay 

163 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

behind  it.  Still  we  wrestle  with  the  angel,  lamed  though 
we  are  by  the  contest,  and  we  cannot  let  him  go  until  the 
day  breaks  and  the  shadows  flee  away.  It  would  be  easier 
perhaps  to  give  up  the  religious  point  of  view,  but  for 
that  ease  we  should  pay  with  our  life.  For  that  swift 
answer,  achieved  by  leaving  out  prime  factors  in  the 
problem,  we  should  be  betraying  the  self  for  whose  sake 
alone  any  answer  is  valuable.  It  does  not  pay  to  cut  such 
Gordian  knots!  Our  task,  then,  is  to  preach  transcend- 
ence again,  not  in.  terms  of  the  old  absolutist  philoso- 
phy, but  in  terms  of  the  perceptions,  the  needs,  the  ex- 
perience of  the  human  heart  and  mind  and  will  which 
produced  that  philosophy. 

Nor  is  this  so  hard  to  do.  Now,  as  always  for  the 
genuinely  religious  temperament,  there  are  abundant 
riches  of  material  lying  ready  to  its  hand.  It  is  not  diffi- 
cult to  make  transcendence  real  and  to  reveal  to  men 
their  consummate  need  of  it  when  we  speak  of  it  in  the 
language  of  experience  and  perception.  What  preaching 
should  avoid  is  the  abstractions  of  an  archaic  system  of 
thought  with  all  their  provocative  and  contentious  ele- 
ments, the  mingled  dogmatism  and  incompleteness  which 
any  worked-out  system  contains.  It  is  so  foolish  in  the 
preacher  to  turn  himself  into  a  lay  philosopher.  Let  him 
keep  his  insight  clear,  through  moral  discipline  keep  his 
intuitions  high,  his  spirit  pure,  and  then  he  can  furnish 
the  materials  for  philosophy. 

Thus  an  almost  universal  trait  of  the  religious  tem- 
perament is  in  its  delight  in  beauty.  Sometimes  it  is  re- 
pressed by  an  irreligious  asceticism  or  narrowed  and 
stunted  by  a  literal  and  external  faith.  But  when  the  re- 
ligious man  is  left  free,  it  is  appropriate  to  his  gen- 
ius that  he  finds  the  world  full  of  a  high  pleasure 

164 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

crowded  with  sound,  color,  fragrance,  form,  in  which  he 
takes  exquisite  delight.  There  is,  in  short,  a  serene  and 
poetic  naturalism,  loosely  called  "nature-worship,"  which 
is  keenly  felt  by  both  saints  and  sinners.  All  it  needs  for 
its  consecration  and  perfection  is  to  help  men  to  see  that 
this  naturalism  is  vital  and  precious  because,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  it  is  something  more  than  naturalism,  and  more 
than  pleasure  objectified. 

Recall,  for  instance,  the  splendors  of  the  external 
world  and  that  best  season  of  our  climate,  "the 
long,  slow-breathing  autumn.  What  high  pleasure  we 
take  in  those  hushed  days  of  mid-November  in  the  soft 
brown  turf  of  the  uplands,  the  fragrant  smell  of  mellow 
earth  and  burning  leaves,  the  purple  haze  that  dims  and 
magnifies  the  quiescent  hills.  Who  is  not  strangely  moved 
by  that  profound  and  brooding  peace  into  which  Nature 
then  gathers  up  the  multitudinous  strivings,  the  myriad 
activities  of  her  life?  Who  does  not  love  to  lie,  in  those 
slow-waning  days  upon  the  sands  which  hold  within 
their  golden  cup  the  murmuring  and  dreaming  sea?  The 
very  amplitude  of  the  natural  world,  its  far-flung  grace 
and  loveliness,  spread  out  in  rolling  moor  and  winding 
stream  and  stately  forest  marching  up  the  mountain-side, 
subdues  and  elevates  the  spirit  of  a  man. 

Now,  so  it  has  always  been  and  so  men  have  always 
longed  to  be  the  worshipers  of  beauty.  Therefore  they 
have  believed  in  a  conscious  and  eternal  Spirit  behind  it. 
Because  again  we  know  that  personality  is  the  only  thing 
we  have  of  absolute  worth.  A  man  cannot,  therefore, 
worship  beauty,  wholly  relinquish  himself  to  its  high  de- 
lights, if  he  conceives  of  this  majestic  grace  as  imper- 
sonal and  inanimate.  For  that  which  we  worship  must 
be  greater  than  we.  Behind  it,  therefore,  just  because  it 

165 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

seems  to  us  so  beautiful,  must  be  something  that  calls  to 
the  hidden  deeps  of  the  soul,  something  intimately  akin  to 
our  own  spirits.  So  man  worships  not  nature,  but  the  God 
of  nature ;  senses  an  Eternal  Presence  behind  all  gracious 
form.  For  that  interprets  beauty  and  consecrates  the 
spell  of  beauty  over  us.  This  gives  a  final  meaning  to 
what  the  soul  perceives  is  an  utter  loveliness.  This  gives 
to  beauty  an  eternal  and  cosmic  significance  commensu- 
rate to  its  charm  and  power.  As  long  as  men's  hearts 
surge,  too,  when  the  tide  yearns  up  the  beach ;  as  long  as 
their  souls  become  articulate  when  the  birds  sing  in  the 
dawn,  and  the  flowers  lift  themselves  to  the  sun;  so 
long  will  men  believe  that  only  from  a  supreme  and 
conscious  Loveliness,  a  joyous  and  a  gracious  Spirit  could 
have  come  the  beauty  which  is  so  intimately  related  to 
the  spirit  of  a  man. 

But  not  all  saints  and  sinners  are  endowed  with  this 
joy  and  insight,  this  quick  sensitiveness  to  beauty. 
Some  of  them  cannot  find  the  eternal  and  transcendent 
God  in  a  loveliness  which,  by  temperament,  they  either 
underrate  or  do  not  really  see.  There  are  a  great  many 
good  people  who  cannot  take  beauty  seriously.  They  be- 
come wooden  and  suspicious  and  uncomfortable  when- 
ever they  are  asked  to  perceive  or  enjoy  a  lovely  object. 
Incredible  though  it  seems,  it  appears  to  them  to  be  un- 
worthy of  any  final  allegiance,  any  complete  surrender, 
any  unquestioning  joy.  But  there  are  other  ways  in  which 
they,  too,  may  come  to  this  sense  of  transcendence,  other 
aspects  of  experience  which  also  demand  it.  Most  often 
it  is  just  such  folk  who  cannot  perceive  beauty,  because 
they  are  practical  or  scientific  or  condemned  to  mean 
surroundings,  who  do  feel  to  the  full  the  grim  force  and 
terror  of  the  external  world.  Prudence,  caution,  hard 

1 66 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

sense  are  to  the  fore  with  them!  Very  well;  there,  too, 
in  these  perceptions  is  an  open  door  for  the  human  spirit 
to  transcend  its  environment,  get  out  of  its  physical  shell. 
The  postulate  of  the  absolute  worth  of  beauty  may  be  an 
argument  for  God  drawn  from  subjective  necessity.  But 
the  postulate  of  sovereign  moral  Being  behind  the  tyr- 
anny and  brutality  of  nature  is  an  argument  of  objective 
necessity  as  well;  herejvve  all  need  God  to  explain  the 
worlcL 

For  we  deal  with  what  certainly  appear  to  be  objective 
aspects  of  the  truth,  when  we  regard  ourselves  in  our 
relation  to  the  might  of  the  physical  universe.  For  even 
as  men  feed  upon  its  beauty,  so  they  have  found  it  neces- 
sary to  discover  something  which  should  enable  them  to 
live  above  and  unafraid  of  its  material  and  gigantic 
power.  We  have  already  seen  how  there  appears  to  be  a 
cosmic  hostility  to  human  life  which  sobers  indeed  those 
who  are  intelligent  enough  to  perceive  it.  It  is  only  the 
fool  or  the  brute  or  the  sentimentalist  who  is  unterrified 
by  nature.  The  man  of  reflection  and  imagination  sees 
his  race  crawling  ant-like  over  its  tiny  speck  of  slowly 
cooling  earth  and  surrounded  by  titanic  and  ruthless 
forces  which  threaten  at  any  moment  to  engulf  it.  The 
religious  man  knows  that  he  is  infinitely  greater  than  the 
beasts  of  the  field  or  the  clods  of  the  highway.  Yet  Vesu- 
vius belches  forth  its  liquid  fire  and  in  one  day  of  stark 
terror  the  great  city  which  was  full  of  men  is  become 
mute  and  desolate.  The  proud  liner  scrapes  along  the 
surface  of  the  frozen  berg  and  crumples  like  a  ship  of 
cards.  There  is  a  splash,  a  cry,  a  white  face,  a  lifted 
arm,  and  then  all  the  pride  and  splendor,  all  the  hopes 
and  fears,  the  gorgeous  dreams,  the  daring  thoughts  are 

167 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

gone.  But  the  ice  floats  on  unscarred  and  undeterred  and 
the  ocean  tosses  and  heaves  just  as  it  did  before. 

Now,  if  this  is  all,  if  there  is  for  us  only  the  physical 
might  of  nature  and  the  world  is  only  what  it  seems  to 
be;  if  there  is  no  other  God  except  such  as  can  be  found 
within  this  sort  of  cosmic  process,  then  human  life  is  a 
sardonic  mockery,  and  self-respect  a  silly  farce,  and  all 
the  heroism  of  the  heart  and  the  valor  of  the  mind  the 
unmeaning  activities  of  an  insignificant  atom.  The  very 
men  who  will  naturally  enter  your  churches  are  the  ones 
who  have  always  found  that  theory  of  life  intolerable.  It 
doesn't  take  in  all  the  facts.  They  could  not  live  by  it 
and  the  soul  of  the  race,  looking  out  upon  this  universe 
of  immeasurable  material  bulk,  has  challenged  it  and 
dared  to  assert  its  own  superiority. 

So  by  this  road  these  men  come  back  to  the  tran- 
scendent God  without  whom  they  cannot  guard  that  in- 
tegrity of  personality  which  we  are  all  set  to  keep.  For 
\here  there  is  no  way  of  believing  in  oneself,  no  way  of 
enduring  this  world  or  our  place  in  it  and  no  tolerable  way 
of  understanding  it  except  we  look  beneath  this  cosmic 
hostility  and  find  our  self-respect  and  a  satisfying  cosmic 
meaning  in  perceiving  spiritual  force,  a  conscious  ethical 
purpose,  which  interpenetrates  the  thunder  and  the  light- 
ning, which  lies  behind  the  stars  as  they  move  in  their 
perpetual  courses.  "Through  it  the  most  ancient  heavens 
are  fresh  and  strong."  Integrity  of  personality  in  such  a 
world  as  this,  belief  in  self,  without  which  life  is  dust 
and  ashes  in  the  mouth,  rest  on  the  sublime  assumption 
that  suffusing  material  force  is  ethical  spirit,  more  like 
'  unto  us  than  it,  controlling  force  in  the  interest  of  moral 
(  and  eternal  purposes.  In  these  purposes  living,  not  me- 
chanical, forces  play  a  major  part. 

1 68 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

Of  course,  to  all  such  reasoning  the  Kantians  and  hu- 
manists reply  that  these  notions  of  an  objective  and  eter- 
nal beauty,  of  a  transcendent  and  actual  Cosmic  Being 
exist  within  the  mind.  They  are  purely  subjective  ideas, 
they  are  bounded  by  the  inexorable  circle  of  our  experi- 
ence, hence  they  offer  no  proof  of  any  objective  reality 
which  may  in  greater  or  less  degree  correspond  to  them. 

However,  there  must  be  a  "source"  of  these  ideas.  To 
which  the  philosophers  reply,  Yes,  they  are  "primitive  and 
necessary,"  produced  by  reason  only,  without  borrowing 
anything  from  the  senses  or  the  understanding.  Yet  there 
is  no  sufficient  evidence  that  the  idea  of  God  is  thus  pro- 
duced by  any  faculty  of  mind  acting  in  entire  freedom 
from  external  influence.  On  the  contrary,  the  idea  ap- 
pears to  owe  much  to  the  operation  of  external  things 
upon  the  mind ;  it  is  not  then  the  wholly  unaffected  prod- 
uct of  reason.  It  is  a  response  no  less  than  an  intuition. 
Like  all  knowledge  a  discovery,  but  the  discovery  of 
something  there  which  could  be  discovered,  hence,  in 
that  sense,  a  revelation. 

It  is  not  necessary,  then,  for  men  to  meet  their  situa- 
tion in  the  cosmos  by  saying  with  Kant:  We  will  act  as 
though  there  were  a  God,  although  we  are  always  con- 
scious that  we  have  no  real  knowledge  of  Him  as  an  ex- 
ternal being.  In  the  light  of  the  tragic  circumstances  of 
humanity,  this  is  demanding  the  impossible.  No  sane  body 
of  men  will  ever  get  sufficient  inspiration  for  life  or  find 
an  adequate  solution  for  the  problem  of  life  by  resting 
upon  mere  value  judgments  which  they  propose,  by  an  ef- 
fort of  will,  to  put  in  the  place  of  genuine  reality  judg- 
ments. Indeed,  there  is  a  truly  scholastic  naivete,  a  sort 
of  solemn  and  unconscious  humor,  in  seriously  proposing 
that  men  should  vitalize  and  consecrate  their  deepest 

169 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

purposes  and  most  difficult  experiences  by  hypothesizing 
mere  appearances  and  illusions. 

Nor  are  we  willing  either  to  say  with  Santayana  that 
all  our  sense  of  the  beauty  of  the  world  is  merely  pleas- 
ure objectified  and  that  we  can  infer  no  eternal  Beauty 
from  it.  We  are  aware  that  there  cannot  be  an  immediate 
knowledge  of  a  reality  distinct  from  ourselves,  that  all 
our  knowledge  must  be,  in  the  nature  of  the  case,  an 
idea,  a  mental  representation,  that  we  can  never  know 
the  Thing  Itself.  But  if  we  believe,  as  we  logically  and 
reasonably  may,  that  our  subjective  ideas  are  formed 
under  the  influence  of  objects  unknown  but  without  us, 
produced  by  stimuli,  real,  if  not  perceived  apart  from 
our  own  consciousness,  then  we  may  say  that  what  we 
have  is  a  mediate  or  representative  knowledge  not  only 
of  an  Eternal  Being  but  formed  under  the  influence  of 
that  Being.  Nor  does  the  believer  ask  for  more.  He  does 
not  expect  to  see  the  King  in  His  beauty;  he  only  needs 
to  know  that  He  is,  that  He  is  there. 

How  self-verifying  and  moving,  then,  are  the  appeals 
ready  to  our  hands.  As  long  as  man  with  the  power  to 
question,  to  strive,  to  aspire,  to  endure,  to  suffer,  lives  in 
a  universe  of  ruthless  and  overwhelming  might,  so  long, 
if  he  is  to  understand  it  or  maintain  his  reason  and  his 
dignity,  he  will  believe  it  to  be  controlled  by  a  Spirit  be- 
yond no  less  than  within,  from  whom  his  spirit  is  derived. 
It  is  out  of  the  struggle  to  revere  and  conserve  human 
personality,  out  of  the  belief  in  the  indefectible  worth 
and  honor  of  selfhood  that  our  race  has  fronted  a  uni- 
verse in  arms,  and  pitting  its  soul  against  nature  has 
cried,  "God  is  my  refuge :  underneath  me,  at  the  very 
moment  when  I  am  engulfed  in  earthquake  shock  or  shat- 
tered in  the  battle's  roar,  there  are  everlasting  arms!" 

170 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

There  is  something  which  is  too  deep  for  tears  in  the  un- 
conquerable idealism,  the  utter  magnanimity  of  the  faith 
of  the  human  spirit  in  that  which  will  answer  to  itself,  ; 
as  evidenced  in  this  forlorn  and  glorious  adventure  of  ' 
the  soul.  Sometimes  we  are  constrained  to  ask  ourselves, 
How  can  the  heart  of  man  go  so  undismayed  through  the  l 
waste  places  of  the  world? 

But,  of  course,  the  preacher's  main  task  is  to  interpret 
man's  moral  experience,  which  drives  him  out  to  search 
for  the  eternal  in  the  terms  of  the  "other"  and  redeem- 
ing God.  We  have  spoken  of  the  depersonalizing  of  re- 
ligion which  paganism  and  humanism  alike  have  brought 
upon  the  world.  One  evidence  of  that  has  been  the  way 
in  which  we  have  confounded  the  social  expressions  of 
religion  with  its  individual  source.  We  are  so  concerned  \ 
with  the  effect  of  our  religion  upon  the  community  that 
we  have  forgotten  that  the  heart  of  religion  is  found  in  j 
the  solitary  soul.  All  of  which  means  that  we  have  here  i 
again  yielded  to  the  time  spirit  that  enfolds  us  and  have  * 
come  to  think  of  man  as  religious  if  he  be  humane.  But 
that  is  not  true.  No  man  is  ever  religious  until  he  becomes 
devout.  And  indeed  no  man  of  our  sort — the  saint  and 
sinner  sort — is  ever  long  and  truly  humane  unless  the 
springs  of  his  tenderness  for  men  are  found  in  his  ever 
widening  and  deepening  gratitude  to  God !  Hence  no  man 
was  ever  yet  able  to  preach  the  living  God  until  he  under- 
stood that  the  central  need  in  human  life  is  to  reconcile 
the  individual  conscience  to  itself,  compose  the  anarchy 
of  the  spiritual  life.  Men  want  to  be  happy  and  be  fed; 
but  men  must  have  inward  peace. 

We  swing  back,  therefore,  to  the  native  ground  of 
preaching,  approach  the  religious  problem,  now,  not  from 
the  aesthetic  or  the  scientific,  but  from  the  moral  angle. 

171 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

Here  we  are  dealing  with  the  most  poignant  of  all  human 
experiences.  For  it  is  in  this  intensely  personal  world  of 
moral  failure  and  divided  will  that  men  are  most  acutely 
aware  of  themselves  and  hence  of  their  need  of  that 
other-than-self  beyond.  The  sentimental  idealizing  of 
contemporary  life,  the  declension  of  the  humanist's  opti- 
mism into  that  superficial  complacency  which  will  not  see 
what  it  does  not  like  or  what  it  is  not  expedient  to  see, 
makes  one's  mind  to  chuckle  while  one's  heart  doth  ache. 
There  is  a  brief  heyday,  its  continuance  dependent  upon 
the  uncontrollable  factors  of  outward  prosperity,  physical 
and  nervous  vigor,  capacity  for  preoccupation  with  the 
successive  novelties  of  a  diversified  and  complicated 
civilization,  in  which  even  men  of  religious  temperament 
can  minimize  or  ignore,  perhaps  sincerely  disbelieve  in, 
their  divided  life.  Sometimes  we  think  we  may  sin  and 
be  done  with  it.  But  always  in  the  end  man  must  come 
back  to  this  moral  tragedy  of  the  soul.  Because  sin  will 
not  be  done  with  us  when  we  are  done  with  it.  Every 
evil  is  evil  to  him  that  does  it  and  sooner  or  later  we  are 
compelled  to  understand  that  to  be  a  sinner  is  the  sorest 
and  most  certain  punishment  for  sinning. 

Then  the  awakening  begins.  Then  can  preaching  stir 
the  heart  until  deep  answereth  unto  deep.  It  can  talk  of 
the  struggle  with  moral  temptation  and  weakness ;  of  the 
unstable  temperament  which  oscillates  between  the  gutter 
and  the  stars ;  of  the  perversion  or  abuse  of  impulses 
good  in  themselves;  of  the  dreadful  dualism  of  the  soul. 
For  these  are  inheritances  which  have  made  life  tragic 
in  every  generation  for  innumerable  human  beings.  Who- 
ever needed  to  explain  to  a  company  of  grown  men  and 
women  what  the  cry  of  the  soul  for  its  release  from  pas- 
sion is  ?  Every  generation  has  its  secret  pessimists,  brood- 

172 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

ing  over  the  anarchy  of  the  spirit,  the  issues  of  a  dis- 
tracted life.  We  need  not  ask  with  Faust,  "Where  is  that 
place  which  men  call  'Hell'?"  nor  wait  for  Mephistoph- 
eles  to  answer, 

"  Hell  is  in  no  set  place,  nor  is  it  circumscribed, 
For  where  we  are — is  Hell!" 

Now,  it  is  from  such  central  and  poignant  experiences 
as  these  that  men  have  been' constrained  to  look  outward 
for  a  God.  For  these  mark  the  very  disintegration  of  per- 
sonality, the  utter  dissipation  of  selfhood.  That  is  the 
inescapable  horror  of  sin.  That  is  what  we  mean  when  we 
say  sinners  are  lost;  so  they  are,  they  are  lost  to  their 
own  selves.  With  what  discriminating  truth  the  father 
in  the  parable  of  the  lost  boy  speaks.  "This,  my  son,"  he 
says,  "was  dead  though  he  is  alive  again."  So  it  is  with 
us ;  being  is  the  price  we  pay  for  sinning.  The  more  we  do 
wrong  the  less  we  are.  How  then  shall  we  become  alive 
again  ? 

It  is  out  of  the  shame  and  passion,  the  utter  need 
of  the  human  heart,  which  such  considerations  show  to  be 
real  that  men  have  built  up  their  redemptive  faiths.  For 
all  moral  victory  is  conditioned  upon  help  from  without. 
To  be  sure  each  will  and  soul  must  strive  desperately, 
even  unto  death,  yet  all  that  strife  shall  be  in  vain  unless 
One  stoops  down  from  above  and  wrestles  with  us  in 
the  conflict.  For  the  sinner  must  have  two  things,  both 
of  them  beyond  his  unaided  getting,  or  he  will  die.  He 
must  be  released  from  his  captivity.  Who  does  not  know 
the  terrible  restlessness,  that  grows  and  feeds  upon  itself 
and  then  does  grow  some  more,  of  the  man  bound  by 
evil  and  wanting  to  get  out?  The  torture  of  sin  is  that  it 
deprives  us  of  the  power  to  express  ourselves.  The  cry 

173 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

of  moral  misery,  therefore,  is  always  the  groaning  of  the 
prisoner.  Oh,  for  help  to  break  the  bars  of  my  intolerable 
and  delicious  sin  that  I  may  be  myself  once  more!  Oh, 
for  some  power  greater  than  I  which,  being  greater,  can 
set  me  free ! 

But  more  than  the  sinner  wants  to  be  free  does  he 
want  to  be  kept.  Along  with  the  passion  for  liberty  is 
the  desire  for  surrender.  Again,  then,  he  wants  some- 
thing outside  himself,  some  Being  so  far  above  the  world 
he  lives  in  that  it  can  take  him,  the  whole  of  him,  break 
his  life,  shake  it  to  its  foundations,  then  pacify,  compose 
it,  make  it  anew.  He  is  so  tired  of  his  sin ;  he  is  so  weary 
with  striving ;  he  wants  to  relinquish  it  all ;  get  far  away 
from  what  he  is;  flee  like  a  bird  to  the  mountain;  lay 
down  his  life  before  the  One  like  whom  he  would  be.  So 
he  wants  power,  he  wants  peace.  He  would  be  himself,  he 
would  lose  himself.  He  prays  for  freedom,  he  longs  for 
captivity. 

Now,  out  of  these  depths  of  human  life,  these  vast 
antinomies  of  the  spirit,  has  arisen  man's  belief  in  a  Sav- 
iour-God. Sublime  and  awful  are  the  sanctions  upon 
which  it  rests.  Out  of  the  extremity  and  definiteness  of 
our  need  we  know  that  He  must  be  and  we  know  what 
He  must  be  like.  He  is  the  One  to  whom  all  hearts  are 
open,  all  desires  known,  from  whom  no  secrets  are  hid. 
Who  could  state  the  mingling  of  desire  and  dread  with 
which  men  strive  after,  and  hide  from,  such  a  God?  We 
want  Him,  yet  until  we  have  Him  how  we  fear 
Him.  For  that  inclusive  knowledge  of  us  which  is  God, 
if  only  we  can  bear  to  come  to  it,  endows  us  with  free- 
dom. For  then  all  the  barriers  are  down,  there  is  noth- 
ing to  conceal,  nothing  to  explain,  nothing  to  hold  back. 
Then  reality  and  appearance  coincide,  character  and  con- 

174 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

dition  correspond.  I  am  what  I  am  before  Him.  Supreme 
reality  from  without  answers  and  completes  my  own,  and 
makes  me  real,  and  my  reality  makes  me  free. 

But  if  He  thus  knows  me,  and  through  that  knowledge 
every  inner  inhibition  melts  in  His  presence  and  every 
damning  secret's  out,  and  all  my  life  is  spread  like  an 
open  palm  before  His  gaze,  and  I  am  come  at  last, 
through  many  weary  roads,  unto  my  very  self,  why  then 
I  can  let  go,  I  can  relinquish  myself.  The  dreadful  ten- 
sion's gone  and  in  utter  surrender  the  soul  is  poured  out, 
until,  spent  and  expressed,  rest  and  peace  flood  back  into 
the  satisfied  life.  So  the  life  is  free ;  so  the  life  is  bound. 
So  a  man  stands  upon  his  feet ;  so  he  clings  to  the  Rock 
that  is  higher  than  he.  So  the  life  is  cleansed  in  burning 
light;  so  the  soul  is  hid  in  the  secret  of  God's  presence. 
So  men  come  to  themselves ;  so  men  lose  themselves  in 
the  Eternal.  There  is  perfect  freedom  at  last  because  we 
have  attained  to  complete  captivity.  There  is  power  ac- 
companied by  peace.  That  is  the  gift  which  the  vision  of 
a  God,  morally  separate  from,  morally  other  than  we, 
brings  to  the  inward  strife,  the  spiritual  agony  of  the 
world.  This  is  the  need  which  that  faith  satisfies.  It  is,  I 
suppose,  in  this  exulting  experience  of  moral  freedom 
and  spiritual  peace  which  comes  to  those  men  who  make 
the  experiment  of  faith  that  they,  for  the  most  part,  find 
their  sufficient  proof  of  the  divine  reality.  Who  ever 
doubted  His  existence  who  could  cry  with  all  that  innu- 
merable company  of  many  kindreds  and  peoples  and 
tongues : 

"  He  brought  me  up  also  out  of  an  horrible  pit,  out  of 

the  miry  clay ; 

-And  he  set  my  feet  upon  a  rock,  and  established  my 
goings. 

175 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

And  he  hath  put  a  new  song  in  my  mouth,  even  praise 
unto  our  God." 

Here,  then,  is  the  preaching  which  is  religious.  How 
foolish  are  we  not  to  preach  it  more !  How  trivial  and  im- 
pertinent it  is  to  question  the  permanence  of  the  religious 
interpretation  of  the  world !  What  a  revelation  of  per- 
sonal insignificance  it  is  to  fail  to  revere  the  majesty  of 
the  devout  and  aspiring  life!  That  which  a  starved  and 
restless  and  giddy  world  has  lost  is  this  pool  of  quietness, 
this  tower  of  strength,  this  cleansing  grace  of  salvation, 
this  haven  of  the  Spirit.  Belief  in  a  transcendent  deity  is 
as  natural  as  hunger  and  thirst,  as  necessary  as  sleep  and 
breathing.  It  was  the  inner  and  essential  needs  of  our  fa- 
thers' lives  which  drove  them  out  to  search  for  Him.  It 
will  be  the  inner  and  essential  needs  of  the  lives  of  our 
children  that  shall  bring  them  to  the  altar  where  their 
fathers  and  their  fathers'  fathers  bowed  down  before 
them.  Are  we  going  to  be  afraid  to  keep  its  fires  burning? 

And  so  we  come  to  our  final  and  most  difficult  aspect 
of  this  transcendent  problem.  We  have  talked  of  the  man 
who  is  separate  from  nature,  and  who  knows  himself  as 
man  because  behind  nature  he  sees  the  God  from  whom 
he  is  separate,  too.  We  have  seen  how  he  needs  that 
"otherness"  in  God  to  maintain  his  personality  and  how 
the  gulf  between  him  and  that  God  induces  that  sense  of 
helplessness  which  makes  the  humility  and  penitence  of 
the  religious  life.  We  must  come  now  to  our  final  ques- 
tion. How  is  he  to  bridge  the  gulf  ?  By  what  power  can  he 
go  through  with  this  experience  we  have  just  been  relat- 
ing and  find  his  whole  self  in  a  whole  world  ?  How  can  he 
dare  to  try  it  ?  How  can  he  gain  power  to  achieve  it  ? 

Perhaps  this  is  the  central  difficulty  of  all  religion.  It 
is  certainly  the  one  which  the  old  Greeks  felt.  Plato,  the 

176 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

father  of  Christian  theology,  and  all  neo-platonists,  knew 
that  the  gulf  is  here  between  man  and  God  and  they  knew 
that  something  or  someone  must  bridge  it  for  us.  They 
perceived  that  man,  unaided,  cannot  leap  it  at  a  stride. 
We  proceed,  driven  by  the  facts  of  life,  to  the  point 
where  the  soul  looks  up  to  the  Eternal  and  confesses  the 
kinship,  and  knows  that  only  in  His  light  shall  it  see 
light,  and  that  it  only  shall  be  satisfied  when  it  awakes  in 
His  likeness.  But  how  shall  the  connection  be  made? 
What  shall  enable  us  to  do  that  mystic  thing,  come  back 
to  God  ?  We  have  frightful  handicaps  in  the  attempt. ' 
How  shall  the  distrust  that  sin  creates,  the  hardness  that 
sin  forms,  the  despair  and  helplessness  that  sin  induces, 
the  dreadful  indifference  which  is  its  expression, — how 
shall  they  be  removed?  How  shall  the  unfaith  which  the 
mystery,  the  suffering,  the  evil  of  the  world  induce  be 
overcome?  Being  a  sinner  I  do  not  dare,  and  being  ig- 
norant I  do  not  believe,  to  come.  God  is  there  and  God 
wants  us ;  like  as  a  father  pitieth  his  children  so  He  pit- 
ieth  us.  He  knoweth  our  frame,  He  remembereth  that 
we  are  dust.  We  know  that  is  true ;  again  we  do  not  know 
it  is  true.  All  the  sin  that  is  in  us  and  all  which  that  sin 
has  done  to  us  insists  and  insists  that  it  is  not  true.  And 
the  mind  wonders — and  wonders.  What  shall  break  that 
distrust ;  and  melt  away  the  hardness  so  that  we  have  an 
open  mind ;  and  send  hope  into  despair,  hope  with  its 
accompanying  confidence  to  act ;  change  unfaith  to  belief, 
until,  in  having  faith,  we  thereby  have  that  which  faith 
believes  in?  How  amazing  is  life!  We  look  out  into  the 
heavenly  country,  we  long  to  walk  therein,  we  have  so 
little  power  to  stir  hand  or  foot  to  gain  our  entrance.  We 
know  it  is  there  but  all  the  facts  of^our  rebellious  or  self- 

177 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

centered  life,  individual  and  associated  alike,  are  against 
it  and  therefore  we  do  not  know  that  it  is  there. 

Philosophy  and  reason  and  proofs  of  logic  cannot 
greatly  help  us  here.  No  man  was  ever  yet  argued  into 
the  kingdom  of  God.  We  cannot  convince  ourselves  of 
our  souls.  For  we  are  creatures,  not  minds;  lives,  not 
ideas.  Only  life  can  convince  life;  only  a  Person  but,  of 
course,  a  transcendent  person  that  is  more  like  Him  than 
like  us,  can  make  that  Other-who-lives  certain  and  sure 
for  us.  This  necessity  for  some  intermediary  who  shall 
be  a  human  yet  more-than-human  proof  that  God  is  and 
that  man  may  be  one  with  Him;  this  reinforcing  of  the 
old  argument  from  subjective  necessity  by  its  verifica- 
tion in  the  actual  stuff  of  objective  life,  has  been  every- 
where sought  by  men. 

Saviours,  redeemers,  mediators,  then,  are  not  theologi- 
cal manikins.  They  are  not  superfluous  figures  born  of 
a  mistaken  notion  of  the  universe.  They  are  not  second- 
ary gods,  concessions  to  our  childishness.  They,  too,  are 
called  for  in  the  nature  of  things.  But  to  really  mediate 
they  must  have  the  qualities  of  both  that  which  they 
transmit  and  of  those  who  receive  the  transmission. 
Most  of  all  they  must  have  that  "other"  quality,  so  tri- 
umphant and  self-verifying  that  seeing  it  constrains  be- 
lief. A  mediator  wholly  unlike  ourselves  would  be  a 
meaningless  and  mocking  figure.  But  a  mediator  who 
was  chiefly  like  ourselves  would  be  a  contradiction  in 
terms ! 

So  we  come  back  again  to  the  old  problem.  Man  needs 
some  proof  that  he  who.  knows  that  he  is  more  than 
dust  can  meet  with  that  other  life  from  whose  star  his 
speck  has  been  derived.  Something  has  got  to  give  him 
powerful  reinforcement  for  this  supreme  effort  of  will, 

178 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

of  faith.  If  only  he  could  know  that  he  and  it  ever  have 
met  in  the  fields  of  time  and  space,  then  he  would  be 
saved.  For  that  would  give  him  the  will  to  believe;  that 
would  prove  the  ultimate ;  give  him  the  blessed  assurance 
which  heals  the  wounds  of  the  heart.  Then  he  would  have 
power  to  surrender.  Then  he  would  no  longer  fear  the 
gulf,  he  would  walk  out  onto  it  and  know  that  as  he 
walked  he  was  with  God. 

Some  such  reasoning  as  this  ought  to  make  clear  the 
place  that  Jesus  holds  in  Christian  preaching  and  why 
we  call  Him  Saviour  and  why  salvation  comes  for  us 
who  are  of  His  spiritual  lineage,  through  Him.  Of 
course  it  is  true  that  Jesus  shows  to  all  discerning  eyes 
what  man  may  be.  But  that  is  not  the  chief  secret  of 
His  power;  that  is  not  why  churches  are  built  to  Him 
and  His  cross  still  fronts,  defeated  but  unconquerable, 
our  pagan  world.  Jesus  was  more-than-nature  and  more- 
than-human.  It  is  this  "other"  quality,  operative  and  ob- 
jectified in  His  experience  within  our  world,  which  gives 
Him  the  absoluteness  which  makes  Him  indispensable 
and  precious.  The  mystery  is  deepest  here.  For  here  we 
transfer  the  antinomy  from  thought  to  conduct ;  from  in- 
ner perception  to  one  Being's  actual  experience.  Here,  in 
Him,  we  say  we  see  it  resolved  into  its  higher  synthesis 
in  actual  operation. 

Here,  then,  we  can  almost  look  into  it.  Yet  when  we 
do  gaze,  our  eyes  dazzle,  our  minds  swerve,  it  is  too 
much.  It  is  not  easy,  indeed,  at  the  present  time  it  seems 
to  be  impossible  to  reconcile  the  Christ  of  history  with 
the  Christ  of  experience.  Yet  there  would  be  neither  right 
nor  reason  in  saying  that  the  former  was  more  of  a  real- 
ity than  the  latter.  And  all  the  time  the  heart  from  which 
great  thoughts  arise,  "the  heart  which  has  its  reasons  of 

179 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

which  the  mind  knows  nothing,"  says,  Here  in  Him  is  the 
consummate  quality,  the  absolute  note  of  life.  Here  the 
impossible  has  been  accomplished.  Here  the  opposites 
meet  and  the  contradictions  blend.  Here  is  something  so 
incredible  that  it  is  true. 

Of  course,  Jesus  is  of  us  and  He  is  ours.  That  is  true 
|  and  it  is  inexpressibly  sweet  to  remember  it.  Again,  to 
use  our  old  solecism,  that  is  the  lesser  part  of  the  truth ; 
the  greater  part,  for  men  of  religion,  is  that  Jesus  is  of 
God,  that  He  belongs  to  Him.  His  chief  office  for  our 
world  has  not  been  to  show  us  what  men  can  be  like ;  it 
has  been  to  give  us  the  vision  of  the  Eternal  in  a  human 
face.  For  if  He  does  reveal  God  to  man  then  He  must 
hold,  as  President  Tucker  says,  the  quality  and  substance 
of  the  life  which  He  reveals. 

Here  is  where  He  differs  immeasurably  from  even  a 

.  Socrates.  What  men  want  most  to  believe  about  Jesus 

\is  this,  that  when  we  commune  with  Him,  we  are  with 

jthe  infinite;  that  man's  just  perception  of  the  Eternal 

|  Spirit,  his  desire  to  escape  from  time  into  reality,  may 

be  fulfilled  in  Jesus.  That  is  the  Gospel :  Come  unto  Him, 

all  ye  that  labor  and  are  heavy  laden,  for  He  will  give 

you  rest.  Whosoever  drinketh  of  this  water  shall  thirst 

again.  But  whosoever  drinketh  of  the  water  that  I  shall 

give  him  shall  never  thirst;  but  the  water  that  I  shall 

give  him  shall  be  in  him  a  well  of  water  springing  up  into 

everlasting  life.  If  the  Son  therefore  shall  make  you  free, 

you  shall  be  free  indeed. 

Now,  if  all  this  is  true,  what  is  the  religious  preaching 
of  Jesus,  what  aspect  of  His  person  meets  the  spiritual 
need?  Clearly,  it  is  His  transcendence.  It  is  not  worthy 
of  us  to  evade  it  because  we  cannot  explain  it.  Surely 
what  has  hastened  our  present  paganism  has  been  the  re- 

180 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

moval  from  the  forefront  of  our  consciousness  of  Jesus 
the  Saviour,  the  divine  Redeemer,  the  absolute  Meeter 
of  an  absolute  need.  Of  such  preaching  of  Jesus  we  have 
today  very  little.  The  pendulum  has  swung  far  to  the 
left,  to  the  other  exclusive  emphasis,  too  obviously  influ- 
enced by  the  currents  of  the  day.  It  was  perhaps  inevita- 
ble that  He  should  for  a  time  drop  out  of  His  former 
place  in  Christian  preaching  under  this  combined  human- 
istic and  naturalistic  movement.  But  it  means  that  again 
we  have  relinquished  those  values  which  have  made  Jesus 
the  heart  of  humanity. 

Of  course,  He  was  a  perfected  human  character  inspired 
above  all  men  by  the  spirit  of  God,  showing  the  capacity 
of  humanity  to  hold  Divinity.  This  is  what  Mary  cele- 
brates in  her  paean,  "He  that  is  mighty  has  magnified  me 
and  holy  is  his  name."  But  is  this  what  men  have  passion- 
ately adored  in  Jesus?  Has  love  of  Him  been  self-love? 
Is  this  why  He  has  become  the  sanctuary  of  humanity? 
I  think  not.  We  have  for  the  moment  no  good  language 
for  the  other  conception  of  Him.  He  is  indeed  the  pledge 
of  what  we  may  be,  but  how  many  of  us  would  ever  be- 
lieve that  pledge  unless  there  was  something  else  in  Him, 
more  than  we,  that  guaranteed  it?  What,  as  President 
Tucker  asks,  is  this  power  which  shall  make  "maybe" 
into  "is"  for  us?  "Without  doubt  the  trend  of  modern 
thought  and  faith  is  toward  the  more  perfect  identifica- 
tion of  Christ  with  humanity.  We  cannot  overestimate 
the  advantage  to  Christianity  of  this  tendency.  The  world 
must  know  and  feel  the  humanity  of  Jesus.  But  it  makes 
the  greatest  difference  in  result  whether  the  ground  of 
the  common  humanity  is  in  Him  or  in  us.  To  borrow  the 
expressive  language  of  Paul,  was  He  'created'  in  us?  Or 
are  we  'created'  in  Him?  Grant  the  right  of  the  affirma- 

181 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

tion  that  'there  is  no  difference  in  kind  between  the  di- 
vine and  the  human' ;  allow  the  interchange  of  terms  so 
that  one  may  speak  of  the  humanity  of  God  and  the  di- 
vinity of  man ;  appropriate  the  motive  which  lies  in  these 
attempts  to  bring  God  and  man  together  and  thus  to  ex- 
plain the  personality  of  Jesus  Christ,  it  is  still  a  matter 
of  infinite  concern  whether  His  home  is  in  the  higher  or 
the  lower  regions  of  divinity.  After,  all,  very  little  is 
gained  by  the  transfer  of  terms.  Humanity  is  in  no  way 

I  satisfied  with  its  degree  of  divinity.  We  are  still  as  anx- 
ious as  ever  to  rise  above  ourselves  and  in  this  anxiety 
we  want  to  know  concerning  our  great  helper,  whether 
He  has  in  Himself  anything  more  than  the  possible  in- 
crease of  a  common  humanity.  What  is  His  power  to 
lift  and  how  long  may  it  last?  Shall  we  ever  reach  His 
level,  become  as  divine  as  He,  or  does  He  have  part  in 
the  absolute  and  infinite  ?  This  question  may  seem  remote 

\  in  result  but  it  is  everything  in  principle.  The  immanence 

]  of  Christ  has  its  present  meaning  and  value  because  of 

{  His  transcendence."1 

Preaching  today  is  not  moving  on  the  level  of  this  dis- 
cussion, is  neither  asking  nor  attempting  to  answer  its 
questions.  Great  preaching  in  some  way  makes  men  see 

j  the  end  of  the  road,  not  merely  the  direction  in  which  it 

1  travels.  The  power  to  do  that  we  have  lost  if  we  have  lost 
the  more-than-us  in  Jesus.  Humanity,,  unaided,  cannot 
look  to  that  end  which  shall  explain  the  beginning.  And 
does  Jesus  mean  very  much  to  us  if  He  is  only  "Jesus"? 
Why  do  we  answer  the  great  invitation,  "Come  unto 
me"?  Because  He  is  something  other  than  us?  Because 

~  He  calls  us  away  from  ourselves?  back  to  home?  Most 

1  "The  Satisfaction  of  Humanity  in  Jesus  Christ,"  Andover 
Review,  January,  1893. 

182 


THE  ALMIGHTY  AND  EVERLASTING  GOD 

of  us  no  longer  know  how  to  preach  on  that  plane  of  ex- 
perience or  from  the  point  of  view  where  such  questions 
are  serious  and  real.  Our  fathers  had  a  world  view  and 
a  philosophy  which  made  such  preaching  easy.  But  their 
power  did  not  lie  in  that  world  view ;  it  lay  in  this  vision 
of  Jesus  which  produced  the  view.  Is  not  this  the  vision 
which  we  need? 


183 


CHAPTER  SEVEN 

Worship  as  the  Chief  Approach  to 
Transcendence 

WHATEVER  becomes  the  inward  and  the  in- 
visible grace  of  the  Christian  community 
such  will  be  its  outward  and  visible  form. 
Those  regulative  ideas  and  characteristic  emotions  which 
determine  in  any  age  the  quality  of  its  religious  experi- 
ence will  be  certain  to  shape  the  nature  and  conduct  of  its 
ecclesiastical  assemblies.  Their  influence  will  show,  both 
in  the  liturgical  and  homiletical  portions  of  public  wor- 
ship. If  anything  further  were  needed,  therefore,  to  in- 
dicate the  secularity  of  this  age,  its  substitutes  for  wor- 
ship and  its  characteristic  type  of  preaching  would,  in 
themselves,  reveal  the  situation.  So  we  venture  to  devote 
these  closing  discussions  to  some  observations  on  the 
present  state  of  Protestant  public  worship  and  the  pre- 
vailing type  of  Protestant  preaching.  For  we  may  thus 
ascertain  how  far  those  ideas  and  perceptions  which  an 
age  like  ours  needs  are  beginning  to  find  an  expression 
and  what  means  may  be  taken  to  increase  their  influence 
through  church  services  in  the  community. 

We  begin,  then,  in  this  chapter,  not  with  preaching, 
but  with  worship.  It  seems  to  me  clear  that  the  chief  of- 
fice of  the  church  is  liturgical  rather  than  homiletical. 
Or,  if  that  is  too  technical  a  statement,  it  may  be  said 
that  the  church  exists  to  set  forth  and  foster  the  religious 

184 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

life  and  that,  because  of  the  nature  of  that  life,  it  finds 
its  chief  opportunity  for  so  doing  in  the  imaginative 
rather  than  the  rationalizing  or  practical  areas  of  human 
expression.  Even  as  Michael  Angelo,  at  the  risk  of  his 
life,  purloined  dead  bodies  that  he  might  dissect  them 
and  learn  anatomy,  so  all  disciples  of  the  art  of  religion 
need  the  discipline  of  intellectual  analysis  and  of  knowl- 
edge of  the  facts  of  the  religious  experience  if  they  are 
to  be  leaders  in  faith.  There  is  a  toughness  of  fiber  needed 
in  religious  people  that  can  only  come  through  such  men- 
tal discipline.  But  anatomists  are  not  sculptors.  Michael 
Angelo  was  the  genius,  the  creative  artist,  not  because 
he  understood  anatomy,  but  chiefly  because  of  those  as 
yet  indefinable  and  secret  processes  of  feeling  and  intui- 
tion in  man,  which  made  him  feel  rather  than  under- 
stand the  pity  and  the  terror,  the  majesty  and  the  pathos 
of  the  human  spirit  and  reveal  them  in  significant  and 
expressive  line.  Knowledge  supported  rather  than  rivaled 
insight.  In  the  same  way,  both  saint  and  sinner  need  re- 
ligious instruction.  Nevertheless  they  are  what  they  are 
because  they  are  first  perceptive  rather  than  reasoning 
beings.  They  both  owe,  the  one  his  salvation,  the  other 
his  despair,  to  the  fact  that  they  have  seen  the  vision  of 
the  holy  universe.  Both  are  seers ;  the  saint  has  given  his 
allegiance  to  the  heavenly  vision.  The  sinner  has  resolved 
to  be  disobedient  unto  it.  Both  find  their  first  and  more 
natural  approach  to  religious  truth,  therefore,  through  the 
creative  rather  than  the  critical  processes,  the  emotional 
rather  than  the  informative  powers. 

There  are,  of  course,  many  in  our  churches  who  would 
'dissent  from  this  opinion.  It  is  characteristic  of  Prot- 
estantism, as  of  humanism  in  general,  that  it  lays  its  chief 
emphasis  upon  the  intelligence.  If  we  go  to  church  to 

185 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

practice  the  presence  of  God,  must  we  not  first  know  who 
and  what  this  God  is  whose  presence  with  us  we  are  there 
asked  to  realize?  So  most  Protestant  services  are  more 
informative  than  inspirational.  Their  attendants  are  as- 
sembled to  hear  about  God  rather  to  taste  and  see  that 
the  Lord  is  good.  They  analyze  the  religious  experience 
rather  than  enjoy  it;  insensibly  they  come  to  regard  the 
spiritual  life  as  a  proposition  to  be  proved,  not  a  power 
to  be  appropriated.  Hence  our  services  generally  consist 
of  some  "preliminary  exercises,"  as  we  ourselves  call 
them,  leading  up  to  the  climax — when  it  is  a  climax — of 
the  sermon. 

Here  is  a  major  cause  for  the  declension  of  the  influ- 
ence of  Protestant  church  services.  They  go  too  much  on 
the  assumption  that  men  already  possess  religion  and  that 
they  come  to  church  to  discuss  it  rather  than  to  have  it 
provided.  They  call  men  to  be  listeners  rather  than  par- 
ticipants in  their  temples.  Of  course,  one  may  find  God 
through  the  mind.  The  great  scholar,  the  mathematician 
or  the  astronomer  may  cry  with  Kepler,  "Behold,  I  think 
the  thoughts  of  God  after  him!"  Yet  a  service  which 
places  its  chief  emphasis  upon  the  appeal  to  the  will 
through  instruction  has  declined  from  that  realm  of  the 
absolutes  where  religion  in  its  purest  form  belongs.  For 
since  preaching  makes  its  appeal  chiefly  through  reason, 
it  thereby  attempts  to  produce  only  a  partial  and  relative 
experience  in  the  life  of  the  listener.  It  impinges  upon  the 
will  by  a  slow  process.  Sometimes  one  gets  so  deadly 
weary  of  preaching  because,  in  a  world  like  ours,  the 
reasonable  process  is  so  unreasonable.  That's  a  half  truth, 
of  course,  but  one  that  the  modern  world  needs  to  learn. 

Others  would  dissent,  from  our  position  by  saying  that 
service,  the  life  of  good  will,  is  a  sufficient  worship.  The 

186 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

highest  adoration  is  to  visit  the  widows  and  the  father- 
less in  their  affliction.  Laborare  est  or  are.  What  we  do 
speaks  so  loud  God  does  not  care  for  what  we  say.  True : 
but  the  value  of  what  we  do  for  God  depends  upon  the 
godliness  of  the  doer  and  where  shall  he  find  that  godli- 
ness save  in  the  secret  place  of  the  Most  High  ?  And  the 
greatest  gift  we  can  give  our  fellows  is  to  bring  them 
into  the  divine  presence.  "There  is,"  says  Dr.  William 
A^ams  Brown,  "a  service  that  is  directed  to  the  satisfac- 
tion of  needs  already  in  existence,  and  there  is  a  service 
that  is  itself  the  creator  of  new  needs  which  enlarge  the 
capacity  of  the  man  to  whom  it  would  minister.  To  this 
larger  service  religion  is  committed,  and  the  measure  of 
a  man's  fitness  to  render  it  is  his  capacity  for  worship." 
But  no  one  can  give  more  than  he  has.  If  we  are  to  offer 
such  gifts  we  must  ourselves  go  before  and  lead.  To  cre- 
ate the  atmosphere  in  which  the  things  of  righteousness 
and  holiness  seem  to  be  naturally  exalted  above  the  physi- 
cal, the  commercial,  the  domestic  affairs  of  men;  to  lift 
the  level  of  thought  and  feeling  to  that  high  place  where 
the  spiritual  consciousness  contributes  its  insights  and 
finds  a  magnanimous  utterance — is  there  anything  that 
our  world  needs  more?  There  are  noble  and  necessary 
ministries  to  the  body  and  the  mind,  but  most  needed,  and 
least  often  offered,  there  is  a  ministry  to  the  human  spirit. 
This  is  the  gift  which  the  worshiper  can  bring.  Knowl- 
edge of  God  may  not  be  merely  or  even  chiefly  compre- 
hended in  a  concept  of  the  intelligence ;  knowledge  of  '^ 
Him  is  that  vitalizing  consciousness  of  the  Presence  felt  j 
in  the  heart,  which  opens  our  eyes  that  we  may  see  that 
the  mountain  is  full  of  horses  and  chariots  of  fire  round 
about  us  and  that  they  who  fight  with  us  are  more  than 
they  who  fight  with  them.  This  is  the  true  and  central 

187 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

knowledge  that  private  devotion  and  public  worship  alone 
can  give ;  preaching  can  but  conserve  and  transmit  this  re- 
ligious experience  through  the  mind,  worship  creates  it 
in  the  heart.  Edwards  understood  that  neither  thought 
nor  conduct  can  take  its  place.  "The  sober  performance 
of  moral  duty,"  said  he,  "is  no  substitute  for  passionate 
devotion  to  a  Being  with  its  occasional  moments  of  joy 
and  exaltation." 

N  We  should  then  begin  with  worship.  A  church  which 
does  not  emphasize  it  before  everything  else  is  trying  to 
build  the  structure  of  a  spiritual  society  with  the  corner 
stone  left  out.  Let  us  try,  first  of  all,  to  define  it.  An  old 
and  popular  definition  of  the  descriptive  sort  says  that 
"worship  is  the  response  of  the  soul  to  the  consciousness 
of  being  in  the  presence  of  God."  A  more  modern  defini- 
tion, analyzing  the  psychology  of  worship,  defines  it  as 
"the  unification  of  consciousness  around  the  central  con- 
trolling idea  of  God,  the  prevailing  emotional  tone  being 
that  of  adoration."  Evidently  we  mean,  then,  by  worship 
the  appeal  to  the  religious  will  through  feeling  and  the 
imagination.  Worship  is  therefore  essentially  creative. 
Every  act  of  worship  seeks  to  bring  forth  then  and 
there  a  direct  experience  of  God  through  high  and  con- 
centrated emotion.  It  fixes  the  attention  upon  Him  as  an 
object  in  Himself  supremely  desirable.  The  result  of  this 
unified  consciousness  is  peace  and  the  result  of  this  peace 
and  harmony  is  a  new  sense  of  power.  Worship,  then,  is 
the  attainment  of  that  inward  wholeness  for  which  in  one 
form  or  another  all  religion  strives  by  means  of  contem- 
plation. So  by  its  very  nature  it  belongs  to  the  class  of 
the  absolutes. 

Many  psychologies  of  religion  define  this  contempla- 
tion as  aesthetic,  and  make  worship  a  higher  form  of  de- 

188 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

light.  This  appears  to  me  a  quite  typical  non-religious  in- 
terpretation of  a  religious  experience.  There  are  four 
words  which  need  explaining  when  we  talk  of  worship. 
They  are:  wonder,  admiration,  awe,  reverence.  Wonder 
springs  from  the  recognition  of  the  limitations  of  our 
knowledge;  it  is  an  experience  of  the  mind.  Admiration 
is  the  response  of  a  growing  intelligence  to  beauty,  partly 
an  aesthetic,  partly  an  intellectual  experience.  These  dis- 
tinctions Coleridge  had  in  mind  in  his  well-known  sen- 
tence: "In  wonder  all  philosophy  began;  in  wonder  it 
ends ;  and  admiration  fills  up  the  interspace.  But  the  first 
wonder  is  the  offspring  of  ignorance ;  the  last  is  the  par- 
ent of  adoration."  Awe  is  the  sense-perception  of  the  stu- 
pendous power  and  magnitude  of  the  universe ;  it  is,  quite 
literally,  a  godly  fear.  But  it  is  not  ignoble  nor  cringing, 
it  is  just  and  reasonable,  the  attitude,  toward  the  Whole, 
of  a  comprehensive  sanity. 

Thus  "I  would  love  Thee,  O  God,  if  there  were  no 
heaven,  and  if  there  were  no  hell,  I  would  fear  Thee  no 
less."  Reverence  is  devotion  to  goodness,  sense  of  awe- 
struck loyalty  to  a  Being  manifestly  under  the  influence 
of  principles  higher  than  our  own.1  Now  it  is  with  these 
last  two,  awe  and  reverence,  rather  than  wonder  and  ad- 
miration, that  worship  has  to  do. 

Hence  the  essence  of  worship  is  not  aesthetic  contem- 
plation. Without  doubt  worship  does  gratify  the  aesthetic 
instinct  and  most  properly  so.  There  is  no  normal  expres- 
sion of  man's  nature  which  has  not  its  accompanying  de- 
light. The  higher  and  more  inclusive  the  expression  the 
more  exquisite,  of  course,  the  delight.  But  that  pleasure  is 
the  by-product,  not  the  object,  of  worship.  It  itself  springs 

1  For  a  discussion  of  these  four  words  see  Allen,  Reverence 
as  the  Heart  of  Christianity,  pp.  253  ff. 

189 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

partly  from  the  awe  of  the  infinite  and  eternal  majesty 
which  induces  the  desire  to  prostrate  oneself  before  the 
Lord  our  Maker.  "I  have  heard  of  Thee  by  the  hearing 
of  the  ear:  but  now  mine  eye  seeth  Thee.  Wherefore  I 
abhor  myself,  and  repent  in  dust  and  ashes."  It  also 
springs  partly  from  passionate  devotion  of  a  loyal  will  to 
a  holy  Being.  "Behold,  as  the  eyes  of  servants  look  unto 
the  hand  of  their  masters  and  as  the  eyes  of  a  maid  unto 
the  hand  of  her  mistress;  so  our  eyes  wait  upon  the 
Lord."  Thus  reverence  is  the  high  and  awe-struck  hunger 
for  spiritual  communion.  "My  soul  thirsteth  for  God,  for 
the  living  God.  When  shall  I  come  and  appear  before 
God?" 

There  is  a  noble  illustration  of  the  nature  and  the  uses 
of  worship  in  the  Journals  of  Jonathan  Edwards,  dis- 
tinguished alumnus  of  Yale  College,  and  the  greatest 
mind  this  hemisphere  has  produced.  You  remember  what 
he  wrote  in  them,  as  a  youth,  about  the  young  woman 
who  later  became  his  wife:  "They  say  there  is  a  young 
lady  in  New  Haven  who  is  beloved  of  that  great  Being 
who  made  and  rules  the  world,  and  that  there  are  certain 
seasons  in  which  this  great  Being  in  some  way  or  other 
invisible  comes  to  her  and  fills  her  mind  with  exceeding 
sweet  delight,  and  that  she  hardly  cares  for  anything  ex- 
cept to  meditate  on  Him.  Therefore  if  you  present  all 
the  world  before  her,  with  the  richest  of  its  treasures, 
she  disregards  and  cares  not  for  it  and  is  unmindful  of 
any  pain  or  affliction.  She  has  a  strange  sweetness  in  her 
mind,  and  singular  purity  in  her  affections,  is  most  just 
and  conscientious  in  all  her  conduct,  and  you  could  not 
persuade  her  to  do  anything  wrong  or  sinful  if  you  would 
give  her  all  the  world,  lest  she  should  offend  this  great 
Being.  She  is  of  wonderful  calmness  and  universal  benev- 

190 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

olence  of  mind,  especially  after  this  great  God  has  mani- 
fested Himself  to  her  mind.  She  will  sometimes  go  about 
from  place  to  place  singing  sweetly  and  seems  to  be  al- 
ways full  of  joy  and  pleasure,  and  no  one  knows  for 
what.  She  loves  to  be  alone,  walking  in  the  fields  and 
groves,  and  seems  to  have  some  one  invisible  always  con- 
versing with  her." 

Almost  every  element  of  worship  is  contained  in  this 
description.  First,  we  have  a  young  human  being  emo- 
tionally conscious  of  the  presence  of  God,  who  in  some 
way  or  other  directly  but  invisibly  comes  to  her.  Secondly, 
we  have  her  attention  so  fixed  on  the  adoration  of  God 
that  she  hardly  cares  for  anything  except  to  meditate 
upon  Him.  Thirdly,  as  the  result  of  this  worshipful  ap- 
proach to  religious  reality,  we  have  the  profound  peace 
and  harmony,  the  summum  bonum  of  existence,  coupled 
with  strong  moral  purpose  which  characterize  her  life. 
Here,  then,  is  evidently  the  unification  of  consciousness  in 
happy  awe  and  the  control  of  destiny  through  meditation 
upon  infinite  matters,  that  is,  through  reverent  contem- 
plation of  God.  Is  it  not  one  of  those  ironies  of  history 
wherewith  fate  is  forever  mocking  and  teasing  the  hu- 
man spirit,  that  the  grandson  of  this  lady  and  of  Jona- 
than Edwards  should  have  been  Aaron  Burr  ? 

i 

Clearly,  then,  the  end  of  worship  is  to  present  to  the 
mind,  through  the  imagination,  one  idea,  majestic  and 
inclusive.  So  it  presents  it  chiefly  through  high  and  sus- 
tained feeling.  Worship  proceeds  on  the  understanding 
that  one  idea,  remaining  almost  unchanged  and  holding 
the  attention  for  a  considerable  length  of  time,  so  directs 
the  emotional  processes  that  thought  and  action  are  har-  \ 
monized  with  it.  If  one  reads  the  great  prayers  of  the  cen-  \ 
turies  they  indicate,  for  the  most  part,  an  unconscious 

191 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

understanding  of  this  psychology  of  worship.  Take,  for 
instance,  this  noble  prayer  of  Pusey's. 

"Let  me  not  seek  out  of  Thee  what  I  can  find  only  in 
Thee,  O  Lord,  peace  and  rest  and  joy  and  bliss,  which 
abide  only  in  thine  abiding  joy.  Lift  up  my  soul  above 
the  weary  round  of  harassing  thoughts,  to  Thy  eternal 
presence.  Lift  up  my  soul  to  the  pure,  bright,  serene,  radi- 
ant atmosphere  of  Thy  presence,  that  there  I  may  breathe 
freely,  there  repose  in  Thy  love,  there  be  at  rest  from 
myself  and  from  all  things  that  weary  me,  and  thence 
return  arrayed  with  Thy  peace,  to  do  and  bear  what  shall 
please  Thee." 

This  prayer  expresses  the  essence  of  worship  which  is 
the  seeking,  through  the  fixation  of  attention,  not  the 
delight  but  rather  the  peace  and  purity  which  can 
only  be  found  in  the  consciousness  of  God.  This  peace  is 
the  necessary  outcome  of  the  indwelling  presence.  It  en- 
sues when  man  experiences  the  radiant  atmosphere  of  the 
divine  communion. 

The  same  clear  expression  of  worship  is  found  in 
another  familiar  and  noble  prayer,  that  of  Johann  Arndt. 
Here,  too,  are  phrases  descriptive  of  a  unified  conscious- 
ness induced  by  reverent  loyalty. 

"Ah,  Lord,  to  whom  all  hearts  are  open,  Thou  canst 
govern  the  vessel  of  my  soul  far  better  than  can  I.  Arise, 
O  Lord,  and  command  the  stormy  wind  and  the  troubled 
sea  of  my  heart  to  be  still,  and  at  peace  in  Thee,  that  I 
may  look  up  to  Thee  undisturbed  and  abide  in  union  with 
Thee,  my  Lord.  Let  me  not  be  carried  hither  and  thither 
by  wandering  thoughts,  but  forgetting  all  else  let  me  see 
and  hear  Thee.  Renew  my  spirit,  kindle  in  me  Thy  light 
that  it  may  shine  within  me,  and  my  heart  burn  in  love 
and  adoration  for  Thee.  Let  Thy  Holy  Spirit  dwell  in  me 

192 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

continually,  and  make  me  Thy  temple  and  sanctuary,  and 
fill  me  with  divine  love  and  life  and  light,  with  devout 
and  heavenly  thoughts,  with  comfort  and  strength,  with 
joy  and  peace." 

Thus  here  one  sees  in  the  high  contemplation  of  a 
transcendent  God  the  subduing  and  elevating  of  the  hu- 
man will,  the  restoration  and  composure  of  the  moral 
life.  Finally,  in  a  prayer  of  St.  Anselm's  there  is  a  sort 
of  analysis  of  the  process  of  worship. 

"O  God,  Thou  art  life,  wisdom,  truth,  bounty  and 
blessedness,  the  eternal,  the  only  true  Good.  My  God  and 
my  Lord,  Thou  art  my  hope  and  my  heart's  joy.  I  confess 
with  thanksgiving  that  Thou  hast  made  me  in  Thine 
image,  that  I  may  direct  all  my  thoughts  to  Thee  and 
love  Thee.  Lord,  make  me  to  know  Thee  aright  that  I 
may  more  and  more  love  and  enjoy  and  possess  Thee." 

One  cannot  conclude  these  examples  of  worshipful  ex- 
pression without  quoting  a  prayer  of  Augustine,  which 
is,  I  suppose,  the  most  perfect  brief  petition  in  all  the 
Christian  literature  of  devotion  and  which  gives  the  great 
psychologist's  perception  of  the  various  steps  in  the  unifi- 
cation of  the  soul  with  the  eternal  Spirit  through  sublime 
emotion. 

"Grant,  O  God,  that  we  may  desire  Thee,  and  desiring 
Thee,  seek  Thee,  and  seeking  Thee,  find  Thee,  and  find- 
ing Thee,  be  satisfied  with  Thee  forever." 

I  think  one  may  see,  then,  why  worship  as  distinct 
from  preaching,  or  the  hearing  of  preaching,  is  the  first 
necessity  of  the  religious  life.  It  unites  us  as  nothing  else  ' 
can  do  with  God  the  whole  and  God  the  transcendent.  I 
The  conception  of  God  is  the  sum  total  of  human  needs 
and  desires  harmonized,  unified,  concretely  expressed.  It 
is  the  faith  of  the  worshiper  that  this  concept  is  derived 

193 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

from  a  real  and  objective  Being  in  some  way  correspond- 
ing to  it.  No  one  can  measure  the  influence  of  such  an 
idea  when  it  dominates  the  consciousness  of  any  given 
period.  It  can  create  and  set  going  new  desires  and  habits, 
it  can  minish  and  repress  old  ones,  because  this  idea 
carries,  with  its  transcendent  conception,  the  dynamic 
quality  which  belongs  to  the  idea  of  perfect  power.  But 
this  transcendent  conception,  being  essentially  of  some- 
thing beyond,  without  and  above  ourselves  can  only  be 
"realized"  through  the  feeling  and  the  imagination, 
whose  province  it  is  to  deal  with  the  supersensuous  val- 
ues, with  the  fringes  of  understanding,  with  the  farthest 
bounds  of  knowledge.  These  make  the  springboard,  so  to 
speak,  from  which  man  dares  to  launch  himself  into  that 
sea  of  the  infinite,  which  we  can  neither  understand  nor 
measure,  but  which  nevertheless  we  may  perceive  and 
feel,  which  in  some  sense  we  know  to  be  there. 

So,  if  we  deal  first  with  worship,  we  are  merely  be- 
ginning at  the  beginning  and  starting  at  the  bottom.  And, 
in  the  light  of  this  observation,  it  is  appalling  to  survey 
the  non-liturgical  churches  today  and  see  the  place  that 
public  devotion  holds  in  them.  It  is  not  too  much,  I  think, 
to  speak  of  the  collapse  of  worship  in  Protestant  com- 
munities. No  better  evidence  of  this  need  be  sought  than 
in  the  nature  of  the  present  attempts  to  reinstate  it.  They 
have  a  naivete,  an  incongruity,  that  can  only  be  explained 
on  the  assumption  of  their  impoverished  background. 

This  situation  shows  first  in  the  heterogeneous  char- 
acter of  our  experiments.  We  are  continually  printing  on 
our  churches'  calendars  what  we  usually  call  "programs," 
but  which  are  meant  to  be  orders  of  worship.  We 'are 
also  forever  changing  them.  There  is  nothing  inevitable 
about  their  order;  they  have  no  intelligible,  self-verify- 

194 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

ing  procedure.  Anthems  are  inserted  here  and  there  with- 
out any  sense  of  the  progression  or  of  the  psychology  of 
worship.  Glorias  are  sung  sometimes  with  the  congrega- 
tion standing  up  and  sometimes  while  they  are  sitting 
down.  There  is  no  lectionary  to  determine  a  comprehen- 
sive and  orderly  reading  of  Scripture,  not  much  sequence 
of  thought  or  progress  of  devotion  either  in  the  read  or 
the  extempore  prayers.  There  is  no  uniformity  of  pos- 
ture. There  are  two  historic  attitudes  of  reverence  when 
men  are  addressing  the  Almighty.  They  are  the  standing 
upon  one's  feet  or  the  falling  upon  one's  knees.  For  the 
most  part  we  neither  stand  nor  kneel;  we  usually  loll. 
Some  of  us  compromise  by  bending  forward  to  the  limit- 
ing of  our  breath  and  the  discomfort  of  our  digestion.  It 
is  too  little  inducive  to  physical  ease  or  perhaps  too  derog- 
atory to  our  dignity  to  kneel  before  the  Lord  our  Maker. 
All  this  seems  too  much  like  the  efforts  of  those  who 
have  forgotten  what  worship  really  is  and  are  trying  to 
find  for  it  some  comfortable  or  attractive  substitute. 

Second:  we  show  our  inexperience  by  betraying  the 
confusion  of  aesthetic  and  ethical  values  as  we  strive  for 
variety  and  entertainment  in  church  services;  we  build 
them  around  wonder  and  admiration,  not  around  rever- 
ence and  awe.  But  we  are  mistaken  if  we  suppose  that 
men  chiefly  desire  to  be  pleasantly  entertained  or  extraor- 
dinarily delighted  when  they  go  into  a  church.  They 
go  there  because  they  desire  to  enter  a  Holy  Presence ; 
they  want  to  approach  One  before  whom  they  can  be  still 
and  know  that  He  is  God.  All  "enrichments"  of  a  service 
injected  into  it  here  and  there,  designed  to  make  it  more 
attractive,  to  add  color  and  variety,  to  arrest  the  attention 
of  the  senses  are,  as  ends,  beside  the  point,  and  our  de- 
pendence upon  them  indicates  the  unhappy  state  of  wor- 

195 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

ship  in  our  day.  That  we  do  thus  make  our  professional 
music  an  end  in  itself  is  evident  from  our  blatant  way  of 
advertising  it.  In  the  same  way  we  advertise  sermon 
themes,  usually  intended  to  startle  the  pious  and  provoke 
the  ungodly.  We  want  to  arouse  curiosity,  social  or  politi- 
cal interest,  to  achieve  some  secular  reaction.  We  don't 
advertise  that  tomorrow  in  our  church  there  is  to  be  a 
public  worship  of  God,  and  that  everything  that  we  are 
going  to  do  will  be  in  the  awe-struck  sense  that  He  is 
there.  We  are  afraid  that  nobody  would  come  if  we 
merely  did  that ! 

What  infidels  we  are!  Why  are  we  surprised  that  the 
world  is  passing  us  by  ?  We  say  and  we  sing  a  great  many 
things  which  it  is  incredible  to  suppose  we  would  address 
I  to  God  if  we  really  thought  He  were  present.  Yet  an- 
thems and  congregational  singing  are  either  a  sacrifice 
solemnly  and  joyously  offered  to  God  or  else  all  the  sing- 
ing is  less,  and  worse,  than  nothing  in  a  church  service. 
But  how  often  sentimental  and  restless  music,  making 
not  for  restraint  and  reverence,  not  for  the  subduing  of 
mind  and  heart  but  for  the  expression  of  those  expansive 
and  egotistical  moods  which  are  of  the  essence  of  roman- 
tic singing,  is  what  we  employ.  There  is  a  great  deal  of 
truly  religious  music,  austere  in  tone,  breathing  restraint 
and  reverence,  quietly  written.  The  anthems  of  Pales- 
trina,  Anerio,  Viadana,  Vittoria  among  the  Italians;  of 
Bach,  Haydn,  Handel,  Mozart  among  the  Germans ;  and 
of  Tallis,  Gibbons  and  Purcell  among  the  English,  are  all 
of  the  truly  devout  order.  Yet  how  seldom  are  the  works 
of  such  men  heard  in  our  churches,  even  where  they  em- 
ploy professional  singers  at  substantial  salaries.  We  are 
everywhere  now  trying  to  give  our  churches  splendid  and 
impressive  physical  accessories,  making  the  architecture 

196 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

more  and  more  stately  and  the  pews  more  and  more  com- 
fortable !  Thus  we  attempt  an  amalgam  of  a  mediaeval 
house  of  worship  with  an  American  domestic  interior, 
adoring  God  at  our  ease,  worshiping  Him  in  armchairs, 
offering  prostration  of  the  spirit,  so  far  as  it  can  be  JL__ 
achieved  along  with  indolence  of  the  body. 

So  we  advertise  and  concertize  and  have  silver  vases 
and  costly  flowers  and  conventional  ecclesiastical  furni- 
ture. But  we  still  hold  a  "small-and-early"  in  the  vestibule 
before  service  and  a  "five  o'clock"  in  the  chapel  after- 
ward. Sunday  morning  church  is  a  this-world  function 
with  a  pietized  gossip  and  a  decorous  sort  of  sociable 
with  an  intellectual  fillip  thrown  in.  Thus  we  try  to  make 
our  services  attractive  to  the  secular  instincts,  the  non-re- 
ligious things,  in  man's  nature.  We  try  to  get  him  into  the  \ 
church  by  saying,  "You  will  find  here  what  you  find  else-  ; 
where."  It's  rather  illogical.  The  church  stands  for  some- 
thing different.  We  say,  "You  will  like  to  come  and  be 
one  of  us  because  we  are  not  different."  The  answer  is, 
"I  can  get  the  things  of  this  world  better  in  the  world, 
where  they  belong,  than  with  you."  Thus  we  have  nat- 
uralized our  very  offices  of  devotion !  Hence  the  attempts 
to  revive  worship  are  incongruous  and  inconsistent. 
Hence  they  have  that  sentimental  and  accidental  char- 
acter which  is  the  sign  of  the  amateur.  They  do  not  bring 
us  very  near  to  the  heavenly  country.  It  might  be  well  to  ' 
remember  that  the  servant  of  Jahweh  doth  not  cry  nor 
lift  up  his  voice  nor  cause  it  to  be  heard  in  the  streets. 

Now,  there  are  many  reasons  for  this  anomalous  situa- 
tion. One  of  them  is  our  inheritance  of  a  deep-rooted  , 
Puritan  distrust  of  a  liturgical  service.  That  distrust  is 
today  a  fetish  and  therefore  much  more  potent  that  it  was  j 
when  it  was  a  reason.  Puritanism  was  born  in  the  Ref- ; 

197 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

ormation;  it  came  out  from  the  Roman  church,  where 
worship  was  regarded  as  an  end  in  itself.  To  Catholic 
believers  worship  is  a  contribution  to  God,  pleasing  to 
Him  apart  from  any  effect  it  may  have  on  the  worshiper. 

\  Such  a  theory  of  it  is,  of  course,  open  to  grave  abuse. 
Sometimes  it  led  to  indifference  as  to  the  effect  of  the 

-  worship  upon  the  moral  character  of  the  communicant, 
so  that  worship  could  be  used,  not  to  conquer  evil,  but  to 
make  up  for  it,  and  thus  sin  became  as  safe  as  it  was  easy. 
Inevitably  also  such  a  theory  of  worship  often  degen- 
erated into  an  utter  formalism  which  made  hyprocrisy 
and  unreality  patent,  until  the  hoc  est  corpus  of  the  mass 
became  the  hocus-pocus  of  the  scoffer. 

Here  is  a  reason,  once  valid  because  moral,  for  our 
present  situation.  Yet  it  must  be  confessed  that  again,  as 
so  often,  we  are  doing  what  the  Germans  call  "throwing 
out  the  baby  with  the  bath,"  namely,  repudiating  a  defect 
or  the  perversion  of  an  excellence  and,  in  so  doing,  throw- 
ing away  that  excellence  itself.  It  is  clear  that  no  Protes- 
tant is  ever  tempted  today  to  consider  worship  as  its  own 
reason  and  its  own  end.  We  are,  in  a  sense,  utilitarian 
ritualists.  Worship  to  us  is  as  valuable  as  it  is  valid  be- 
cause it  is  the  chief  avenue  of  spiritual  insight,  a  chief 
means  of  awakening  penitence,  obtaining  forgiveness, 
growing  in  grace  and  love.  These  are  the  ultimates ;  these 
are  pleasing  to  God. 

A  second  reason,  however,  for  our  situation  is  not  ethi- 
cal and  essential,  but  economic  and  accidental.  Our  fa- 
thers' communities  were  a  slender  chain  of  frontier 
settlements,  separated  from  an  ancient  civilization  by  an 
unknown  and  dangerous  sea  on  the  one  hand,  menaced  by 
all  the  perils  of  a  virgin  wilderness  upon  the  other.  All 
their  life  was  simple  to  the  point  of  bareness ;  austere, 

198 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

reduced  to  the  most  elemental  necessities.  Inevitably  the 
order  of  their  worship  corresponded  to  the  order  of  their 
society.  It  is  certain,  I  think,  that  the  white  meeting-house 
with  its  naked  dignity,  the  old  service  with  its  heroic 
simplicity,  conveyed  to  the  primitive  society  which  pro- 
duced them  elements  both  of  high  formality  and  con- 
scious reverence  which  they  could  not  possibly  offer  to 
our  luxurious,  sophisticated  and  wealthy  age. 

Is  it  not  a  dangerous  thing  to  have  brought  an  ever  in- 
creasing formality  and  recognition  of  a  developed  and 
sophisticated  community  into  our  social  and  intellectual 
life  but  to  have  allowed  our  religious  expression  to  re- 
main so  anachronistic?  Largely  for  social  and  economic 
reasons  we  send  most  of  our  young  men  and  young  women 
to  college.  There  we  deliberately  cultivate  in  them  the  per- 
ception of  beauty,  the  sense  of  form,  various  expressions 
of  the  imaginative  life.  But  how  much  has  our  average 
non-liturgical  service  to  offer  to  their  critically  trained 
perceptions?  Our  church  habits  are  pretty  largely  the 
transfer  into  the  sanctuary  of  the  hearty  conventions  of 
middle-class  family  life.  The  relations  in  life  which  are 
precious  to  such  youth,  the  intimate,  the  mystical  and 
subtle  ones,  get  small  recognition  or  expression.  A  hun- 
dred agencies  outside  the  church  are  stimulating  in  the 
best  boys  and  girls  of  the  present  generation  fine  sensi- 
bilities, critical  standards,  the  higher  hungers.  Our  ser- 
vices, chiefly  instructive  and  didactic,  informal  and  easy 
in  character,  irritate  them  and  make  them  feel  like  trucu- 
lent or  uncomfortable  misfits. 

.  A  third  reason  for  the  lack  of  corporate  or  public  of- 
fices of  devotion  in  our  services  lies  in  the  intellectual 
character  of  the  Protestant  centuries.  We  have  seen  how 
they  have  been  centuries  of  individualism.  Character  has 

199 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

been  conceived  of  as  largely  a  personal  affair  expressed 
in  personal  relationships.  The  believer  was  like  Christian 
in  Bunyan's  Pilgrim's  Progress,  He  started  for  the 
Heavenly  Country  because  he  was  determined  to  save 
his  own  soul.  When  he  realized  that  he  was  living  in  the 
City  of  Destruction  it  did  not  occur  to  him  that,  as  a 
good  man,  he  must  identify  his  fate  with  it.  On  the  con- 
trary, he  deserted  wife  and  children  with  all  possible  ex- 
pedition and  got  him  out  and  went  along  through  the 
Slough  of  Despond,  up  to  the  narrow  gate,  to  start  on 
the  way  of  life.  It  was  a  chief  glory  of  mediaeval  society 
that  it  was  based  upon  corporate  relationships.  Its  cathe- 
drals were  possible  because  they  were  the  common  house 
of  God  for  every  element  of  the  community.  Family  and 
class  and  state  were  dominant  factors  then.  But  we  have 
seen  how,  in  the  Renaissance  and  the  Romantic  Move- 
ment, individualism  supplanted  these  values.  Now,  Prot- 
estantism was  contemporary  with  that  new  movement, 
indeed,  a  part  of  it.  Its  growing  egotism  and  the  colossal 
egotism  of  the  modern  world  form  a  prime  cause  for  the 
impoverishment  of  worship  in  Protestant  churches. 

And  so  this  brings  us,  then,  to  the  real  reason  for  our 
devotional  impotence,  the  one  to  which  we  referred  in 
the  opening  sentences  of  the  chapter.  It  is  essentially  due 
to  the  character  of  the  regulative  ideas  of  our  age.  It  lies 
in  that  world  view  whose  expressions  in  literature,  phi- 
losophy and  social  organizations  we  have  been  reviewing 
in  these  pages.  The  partial  notion  of  God  which  our 
age  has  unconsciously  made  the  substitute  for  a  com- 
prehensive understanding  of  Him  is  essentially  to  blame. 
For  since  the  contemporary  doctrine  is  of  His  imma- 
nence, it  therefore  follows  that  it  is  chiefly  through  ob- 
servation of  the  natural  world  and  by  interpretation  of 

200 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

contemporary  events  that  men  will  approach  Him  if  they 
come  to  Him  at  all.  Moreover,  our  humanism,  in  empha- 
sizing the  individual  and  exalting  his  self-sufficiency,  has 
so  far  made  the  mood  of  worship  alien  and  the  need  of  it 
superfluous.  The  overemphasis  upon  preaching,  the  gen- 
eral passion  of  this  generation  for  talk  and  then  more 
talk,  and  then  endless  talk,  is  perfectly  intelligible  in  view 
of  the  regulative  ideas  of  this  generation.  It  seeks  its  un- 
derstanding of  the  world  chiefly  in  terms  of  natural  and 
tangible  phenomena  and  chiefly  by  means  either  of  criti- 
cal observation  or  of  analytic  reasoning.  Hence  preach- 
ing, especially  that  sort  which  looks  for  the  divine  princi- 
ple in  contemporary  events,  has  been  to  the  fore.  But 
worship,  which  finds  the  divine  principle  in  something 
more  and  other  than  contemporary  events — which  indeed 
does  not  look  outward  to  "events"  at  all — has  been 
thrown  into  the  background. 

It  seems  to  me  clear,  then,  that  if  we  are  to  emphasize 
the  transcendent  elements  in  religion;  if  they  represent, 
as  we  have  been  contending,  the  central  elements  of  the 
religious  experience,  its  creative  factors,  then  the  re- 
vival of  worship  will  be  a  prime  step  in  creating  a  more 
truly  spiritual  society.  I  am  convinced  that  a  homilizing 
church  belongs  to  a  secularizing  age.  One  cannot  forget 
that  the  ultimate,  I  do  not  say  the  only,  reason  for  the 
founding  of  the  non-liturgical  churches  was  the  rise  of 
humanism.  One  cannot  fail  to  see  the  connection  between 
humanistic  doctrine  and  moralistic  preaching,  or  between 
the  naturalism  of  the  moment  and  the  mechanicalizing  of 
the  church.  "The  Christian  congregation,"  said  Luther, 
child  of  the  humanistic  movement,  "should  never  assem- 
ble except  the  word  of  God  be  preached."  "In  other  coun- 
tries," says  old  Isaac  Taylor,  "the  bell  calls  people  to  wor- 

201 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

ship ;  in  Scotland  it  calls  them  to  a  preachment."  And  one 
remembers  the  justice  of  Charles  Kingsley's  fling  at  the 
Dissenters  that  they  were  "creatures  who  went  to  church 
to  hear  sermons !"  It  would  seem  evident,  then,  that  a  re- 
newal of  worship  would  be  the  logical  accompaniment  of 
a  return  to  distinctly  religious  values  in  society  and 
church. 

What  can  we  do,  then,  better  for  an  age  of  paganism 
than  to  cultivate  this  transcendent  consciousness?  Direct 
men  away  from  God  the  universal  and  impersonal  to  God 
the  particular  and  intimate.  Nothing  is  more  needed  for 
our  age  than  to  insist  upon  the  truth  that  there  are  both 
common  and  uncommon,  both  secular  and  sacred  worlds ; 
that  these  are  not  contradictory;  that  they  are  com- 
plementary; that  they  are  not  identical.  It  is  the 
church's  business  to  insist  that  men  must  live  in  the 
world  of  the  sacred,  the  uncommon,  the  particular,  in  or- 
der to  be  able  to  surmount  and  endure  the  secular,  the 
common  and  the  universal.  It  is  her  business  to  insist  that 
through  worship  all  this  can  be  accomplished.  But  can 
worship  be  taught  ?  Is  not  the  devotee,  like  the  poet  or  the 
lover  or  any  other  genius,  born  and  not  made?  Well, 
whether  it  can  be  taught  or  not,  it  at  least  can  be  culti- 
vated and  developed,  and  there  are  three  very  practical 
ways  in  which  this  cultivation  can  be  brought  about. 

One  of  them  is  by  paying  intelligent  attention  to  the 
physical  surroundings  of  the  worshiper.  The  assembly 
room  for  worship  obviously  should  not  be  used  for  other 
purposes ;  all  its  suggestions  and  associations  should  be 
of  one  sort  and  that  sort  the  highest.  Quite  aside  from 
the  question  of  taste,  it  is  psychologically  indefensible  to 
use  the  same  building,  and  especially  the  same  room  in  the 
building,  for  concerts,  for  picture  shows,  for  worship. 

202 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

Here  we  at  once  create  a  distracted  consciousness;  we 
dissipate  attention;  we  deliberately  make  it  harder  for 
men  and  women  to  focus  upon  one,  and  that  the  most 
difficult,  if  the  most  precious,  mood. 

For  the  same  reason,  the  physical  form  of  the  room 
should  be  one  that  does  not  suggest  either  the  concert 
hall  or  the  playhouse,  but  suggests  rather  a  long  and  un- 
broken ecclesiastical  tradition.  Until  the  cinema  was  in- 
troduced into  worship,  we  were  vastly  improving  in  these 
respects,  but  now  we  are  turning  the  morning  temple  into 
an  evening  showhouse.  I  think  we  evince  a  most  imperti- 
nent familiarity  with  the  house  of  God!  And  too  often 
the  church  is  planned  so  that  it  has  no  privacies  or  re- 
cesses, but  a  hideous  publicity  pervades  its  every  part. 
We  adorn  it  with  stenciled  frescoes  of  the  same  patterns 
which  we  see  in  hotel  lobbies  and  clubs ;  we  hang  up  maps 
behind  the  reading  desk ;  we  clutter  up  its  platform  with 
grand  pianos. 

It  is  a  mere  matter  of  good  taste  and  good  psychology 
to  begin  our  preparation  for  a  ministry  of  worship  by 
1  changing  all  this.  There  should  be  nothing  in  color  or 
ornament  which  arouses  the  restless  mood  or  distracts 
the  eye.  Severe  and  simple  walls,  restrained  and  devout 
figures  in  glass  windows,  are  only  to  be  tolerated.  De- 
scriptive windows,  attempting  in  a  most  untractable  me- 
dium a  sort  of  naive  realism,  are  equally  an  aesthetic  and 
an  ecclesiastical  offense.  Figures  of  saints  or  great  re- 
ligious personages  should  be  typical,  impersonal,  sym- 
bolic, not  too  much  like  this  world  and  the  things  of  it. 
There  is  a  whole  school  of  modern  window  glass  dis- 
tinguished by  its  opulence  and  its  realism.  It  ought  to  be 
banished  from  houses  of  worship.  Since  it  is  the  object 
of  worship  to  fix  the  attention  upon  one  thing  and  that 

203 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

thing  the  highest,  the  room  where  worship  is  held  should 
have  its  own  central  object.  It  may  be  the  Bible,  idealized 
as  the  word  of  God ;  it  may  be  the  altar  on  which  stands 
the  Cross  of  the  eternal  sacrifice.  But  no  church  ought 
to  be  without  one  fixed  point  to  which  the  eye  of  the 
body  is  insensibly  drawn,  thereby  making  it  easier  to  fol- 
low it  with  the  attention  of  the  mind  and  the  wishes  of 
the  heart.  At  the  best,  our  Protestant  ecclesiastical  build- 
ings are  all  empty!  There  are  meeting-houses,  not  tem- 
ples ;  assembly  rooms,  not  shrines.  There  is  apparently  no 
sense  in  which  we  are  willing  to  acknowledge  that  the 
Presence  is  on  their  altar.  But  at  least  the  attention  of  the 
worshiper  within  them  may  focus  around  some  symbol 
of  that  Presence,  may  be  fixed  on  some  outward  sign 
which  will  help  the  inward  grace. 

But  second :  our  chief  concern  naturally  must  be  with 
the  content  of  the  service  of  worship  itself,  not  with  its 
physical  surroundings.  And  here  then  are  two  things 
which  may  be  said.  First,  any  formal  order  of  worship 
should  be  historic;  it  should  have  its  roots  deep  in  the 
past;  whatever  else  is  true  of  a  service  of  worship  it 
ought  not  to  suggest  that  it  has  been  uncoupled  from  the 
rest  of  time  and  allowed  to  run  wild.  Now,  this  means 
that  an  order  of  worship,  basing  itself  on  the  devotion  of 
the  ages,  will  use  to  some  extent  their  forms.  I  do  not  see 
how  anyone  would  wish  to  undertake  to  lead  the  same 
company  of  people  week  by  week  in  divine  worship  with- 
out availing  himself  of  the  help  of  written  prayers,  great 
litanies,  to  strengthen  and  complement  the  spontaneous 
offices  of  devotion.  There  is  something  almost  incredible 
to  me  in  the  assumption  that  one  man  can,  supposedly  un- 
aided, lead  a  congregation  in  the  emotional  expression  of 
its  deepest  life  and  desires  without  any  assistance  from 

204 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

the  great  sacramentaries  and  liturgies  of  the  past.  Chris- 
tian literature  is  rich  with  a  great  body  of  collects, 
thanksgivings,  confessions,  various  special  petitions, 
which  gather  up  the  love  and  tears,  the  vision  and  the 
anguish  of  many  generations.  These,  with  their  phrases 
made  unspeakably  precious  with  immemorial  association, 
with  their  subtle  fitting  of  phrase  to  insight,  of  expression 
to  need,  born  of  long  centuries  of  experiment  and  aspira- 
tion, can  do  for  a  congregation  what  no  man  alone  can 
ever  hope  to  accomplish.  The  well  of  human  needs  and 
desires  is  so  deep  that,  without  these  aids,  we  have  not 
much  to  draw  with,  no  plummet  wherewith  to  sound  its 
dark  and  hidden  depths. 

I  doubt  if  we  can  overestimate  the  importance  of  giv- 
ing this  sense  of  continuity  in  petitions,  of  linking  up  the 
prayer  of  the  moment  and  the  worship  of  the  day  with 
the  whole  ageless  process  so  that  it  seems  a  part  of  that 
volume  of  human  life  forever  ascending  unto  the  eternal 
spirit,  just  as  the  gray  plume  of  smoke  from  the  sacrifice 
ever  curled  upward  morning  by  morning  and  night  by 
night  from  the  altar  of  the  temple  under  the  blue  Syrian 
sky.  We  cannot  easily  give  this  sense  of  continuity,  this 
prestige  of  antiquity,  this  resting  back  on  a  great  body 
of  experience,  unless  we  know  and  use  the  language  and 
the  phrases  of  our  fathers.  It  is  to  the  God  who  hath 
been  our  dwelling  place  in  all  generations,  that  we  pray ; 
to  Him  who  in  days  of  old  was  a  pillar  of  cloud  by  day 
and  of  fire  by  night  to  His  faithful  children ;  to  the  One 
who  is  the  Ancient  of  Days,  Infinite  Watcher  of  the  sons 
of  men.  Only  by  acquaintance  with  the  phrases,  the  pe- 
titions of  the  past,  and  only  by  a  liberal  use  of  them  can 
we  give  background  and  dignity,  or  anything  approach- 
ing variety  and  completeness,  to  our  own  public  expres- 

205 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

sion  and  interpretation  of  the  devotional  life.  If  anyone 
objects  to  this  use  of  formal  prayers  on  the  ground  of 
their  formality,  let  him  remember  that  we,  too,  are  for- 
mal, only  we,  alas,  have  made  a  cult  of  formlessness.  It 
\  would  surprise  the  average  minister  to  know  the  well- 
worn  road  which  his  supposedly  spontaneous  and  extem- 
pore devotions  follow.  Phrase  after  phrase  following  in 
the  same  order  of  ideas,  and  with  the  same  pitiably  limited 
vocabulary,  appear  week  by  week  in  them.  How  much 
,  better  to  enrich  this  painfully  individualistic  formalism 
I  with  something  of  the  corporate  glories  of  the  whole 
body  of  Christian  believers. 

But,  second:  there  should  be  also  the  principle  of  im- 
mediacy in  the  service,  room  for  the  expression  of  indi- 
vidual needs  and  desires  and  for  reference  to  the  imme- 
diate and  local  circumstances  of  the  believer.  A  church 
in  which  there  is  no  spontaneous  and  extempore  prayer, 
which  only  harked  backward  to  the  past,  might  build  the 
tombs  of  the  prophets  but  it  might  also  stifle  new  voices 
for  a  new  age.  But  extempore  prayer  should  not  be 
impromptu  prayer.  It  should  have  coherence,  dignity,  pro- 
gression. The  spirit  should  have  been  humbly  and  pains- 
takingly prepared  for  it  so  that  sincere  and  ardent  feel- 
ing may  wing  and  vitalize  its  words.  The  great  prayers 
of  the  ages,  known  of  all  the  worshipers,  perhaps  re- 
peated by  them  all  together,  tie  in  the  individual  soul  to 
the  great  mass  of  humanity  and  it  moves  on,  with  its 
fellows,  toward  salvation  as  majestically  and  steadily 
as  great  rivers  flow.  The  extempore  and  silent  prayer, 
not  unpremeditated  but  still  the  unformed  outpouring  of 
the  individual  heart,  gives  each  man  the  consciousness  of 
standing  naked  and  alone  before  his  God.  Both  these,  the 
corporate  and  the  separate  elements  of  worships  are  vi- 

206 


CHIEF  APPROACH  TO  TRANSCENDENCE 

tal ;  there  should  be  a  place  for  each  in  every  true  order 
of  worship. 

But,  of  course,  the  final  thing  to  say  is  the  first  thing. 
Whatever  may  be  the  means  that  worship  employs,  its 
purpose  must  be  to  make  and  keep  the  church  a  place  of 
repose,  to  induce  constantly  the  life  of  relinquishment  to 
God,  of  reverence  and  meditation.  And  this  it  will  do  as 
it  seeks  to  draw  men  up  to  the  "otherness,"  the  majesty, 
the  aloofness,  the  transcendence  of  the  Almighty.  To  this 
end  I  would  use  whatever  outward  aids  time  and  experi- 
ence have  shown  will  strengthen  and  deepen  the  spiritual 
understanding.  I  should  not  fear  to  use  the  cross,  the 
sacraments,  the  kneeling  posture,  the  great  picture,  the 
carving,  the  recitation  of  prayers  and  hymns,  not  alone  to 
intensify  this  sense  in  the  believer  but  equally  to  create 
it  in  the  non-believer.  The  external  world  moulds  the  in-  \  — 
ternal,  even  as  the  internal  makes  the  external.  If  these  } 
things  mean  little  in  the  beginning,  there  is  still  truth  in 
the  assertion  of  the  devotee  that  if  you  practice  them 
they  will  begin  to  mean  something  to  you.  This  is  not 
merely  that  a  meaning  will  be  self-induced.  It  is  more 
than  that.  They  will  put  us  in  the  volitional  attitude,  the 
emotional  mood,  where  the  meaning  is  able  to  penetrate. 
Just  as  all  the  world  acknowledges  that  there  is  an  essen- v 
tial  connection  between  good  manners  and  good  morals, 
between  military  discipline  and  physical  courage,  so  there 
is  a  connection  between  a  devotional  service  and  the  gifts 
of  the  spiritual  life.  Such  a  service  not  merely  strength- . 
ens  belief  in  the  High  and  Holy  One,  it  has  a  real  office  | 
in  creating,  in  making  possible,  that  belief  itself. 

We  shall  sum  it  all  up  if  we  say  in  one  word  that  the 
offices  of  devotion  emphasize  the  cosmic  character  of  re- 
ligion. They  take  us  out  of  the  world  of  moral  theism 

207 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

into  the  world  of  a  universal  theism.  They  draw  us  away 
from  religion  in  action  to  religion  in  itself ;  they  give  us, 
not  the  God  of  this  world,  but  the  God  who  is  from  ever- 
lasting to  everlasting,  to  whom  a  thousand  years  are  but 
as  yesterday  when  it  is  past  and  as  a  watch  in  the 
night.  Thus  they  help  us  to  make  for  ourselves  an  interior 
refuge  into  whose  precincts  no  eye  may  look,  into  whose 
life  no  other  soul  may  venture.  In  that  refuge  we  can  be 
still  and  know  that  He  is  God.  There  we  can  eat  the 
meat  which  the  world  knoweth  not  of,  there  have  peace 
with  Him.  It  is  in  these  central  solitudes,  induced  by  wor- 
ship, that  the  vision  is  clarified,  the  perspective  corrected, 
the  vital  forces  recharged.  Those  who  possess  them  are 
transmitters  of  such  heavenly  messages;  they  issue  from 
them  as  rivers  pour  from  undiminished  mountain 
streams.  Does  the  world's  sin  and  pain  and  weakness 
come  and  empty  itself  into  the  broad  current  of  these  de- 
vout lives?  Then  their  fearless  onsweeping  forces  gather 
it  all  up,  carry  it  on,  cleanse  and  purify  it  in  the  process. 
Over  such  lives  the  things  of  this  world  have  no  power. 
They  are  kept  secretly  from  them  all  in  His  pavilion 
where  there  is  no  strife  of  tongues. 


208 


CHAPTER  EIGHT 
Worship  and  the  Discipline  of  Doctrine 

IF  one  were  to  ask  any  sermon-taster  of  our  genera- 
tion what  is  the  prevailing  type  of  discourse  among 
the  better-known  preachers  of  the  day,  he  would 
probably  answer,  "The  expository."  Expository  preach- 
ing has  had  a  notable  revival  in  the  last  three  decades,  es- 
pecially among  liberal  preachers;  that  is,  among  those 
who  like  ourselves  have  discarded  scholastic  theologies, 
turned  to  the  ethical  aspects  of  religion  for  our  chief  in- 
terests and  accepted  the  modern  view  of  the  Bible.  To 
be  sure,  it  is  not  the  same  sort  of  expository  preaching 
which  made  the  Scottish  pulpit  of  the  nineteenth  century 
famous.  It  is  not  the  detailed  exposition  of  each  word 
and  clause,  almost  of  each  comma,  which  marks  the 
mingled  insight  and  literalism  of  a  Chalmers,  an  Alexan- 
der Maclaren,  a  Taylor  of  the  Broadway  Tabernacle. 
For  that  assumed  a  verbally  inspired  and  hence  an  in- 
errant  Scripture;  it  dealt  with  the  literature  of  the  Old 
and  New  Testaments  as  being  divine  revelations.  The 
new  expository  preaching  proceeds  from  almost  an  op- 
posite point  of  view.  It  deals  with  this  literature  as  be- 
ing a  transcript  of  human  experience.  Its  method  is  di- 
rect and  simple  and,  within  sharp  limits,  very  effective. 
The  introduction  to  one  of  these  modern  expository  ser- 
mons would  run  about  as  follows: 

"I  suppose  that  what  has  given  to  the  Old  and  New 
209 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

Testament  Scriptures  their  enduring  hold  over  the  minds 
and  consciences  of  men  has  been  their  extraordinary  hu- 
manity. They  contain  so  many  vivid  and  accurate  reci- 
tals of  typical  human  experience,  portrayed  with  self- 
verifying  insight  and  interpreted  with  consummate 
understanding  of  the  issues  of  the  heart.  And  since  it  is 
true,  as  Goethe  said,  'That  while  mankind  is  always  pro- 
gressing man  himself  remains  ever  the  same,'  and 
we  are  not  essentially  different  from  the  folk  who  lived 
a  hundred  generations  ago  under  the  sunny  Palestinian 
sky,  we  read  these  ancient  tales  and  find  in  them  a  mirror 
which  reflects  the  lineaments  of  our  own  time.  For  in- 
stance, ..." 

Then  the  sermonizer  proceeds  to  relate  some  famous 
Bible  story,  resolving  its  naive  Semitic  theophanies,  its 
pictorial  narration,  its  primitive  morality,  into  the  terms 
of  contemporary  ethical  or  political  or  economic  princi- 
ples. Take,  for  instance,  the  account  of  the  miracle  of 
Moses  and  the  Burning  Bush.  The  preacher  will  point  out 
that  Moses  saw  a  bush  that  burned  and  burned  and  that, 
unlike  most  furze  bushes  of  those  upland  pastures  which 
were  ignited  by  the  hot  Syrian  sun,  was  not  consumed. 
It  was  this  enduring-  quality  of  the  bush  that  interested 
him.  Thus  Moses  showed  the  first  characteristic  of 
genius,  namely,  capacity  for  accurate  and  discriminating 
observation.  And  he  coupled  this  with  the  scientific  habit 
of  mind.  For  he  said,  "I  will  now  turn  aside  and  see 
why !"  Thus  did  he  propose  to  pierce  behind  the  event  to 
the  cause  of  the  event,  behind  the  movement  to  the  princi- 
ple of  the  movement.  What  a  modern  man  this  Moses 
was !  It  seems  almost  too  good  to  be  true ! 

But  as  yet  we  have  merely  scratched  the  surface  of  the 
story.  For  he  took  his  shoes  from  off  his  feet  when  he 

210 


WORSHIP  AND  DISCIPLINE  OF  DOCTRINE 

inspected  this  new  phenomenon,  feeling  instinctively  that 
he  was  on  holy  ground.  Thus  there  mingled  with  his 
scientific  curiosity  the  second  great  quality  of  genius, 
which  is  reverence.  There  was  no  complacency  here  but 
an  approach  to  life  at  once  eager  and  humble;  keen  yet 
teachable  and  mild.  And  now  behold  what  happens!  As 
a  result  of  this  combination  of  qualities  there  came  to 
Moses  the  vision  of  what  he  might  do  to  lead  his  op- 
pressed countrymen  out  of  their  industrial  bondage. 
Whereupon  he  displayed  the  typical  human  reaction  and 
cried,  "Who  am  I,  that  I  should  go  unto  Pharoah  or  that 
I  should  lead  the  children  of  Israel  out  of  Egypt!"  My 
brother  Aaron,  who  is  an  eloquent  person — and  as  it 
turned  out  later  also  a  specious  one — is  far  better  suited 
for  this  undertaking.  Thus  he  endeavored  to  evade  the 
task  and  cried,  "Let  someone  else  do  it!"  Having  thus 
expounded  the  word  of  God  ( !)  the  sermon  proceeds  to 
its  final  division  in  the  application  of  this  shrewd  and 
practical  wisdom  to  some  current  event  or  parochial  sit- 
uation. 

Now,  such  preaching  is  indubitably  effective  and  not 
wholly  illegitimate.  Its  technique  is  easily  acquired.  It 
makes  us  realize  that  the  early  Church  Fathers,  who  dis- 
played a  truly  appalling  ingenuity  in  allegorizing  the  Old 
Testament  and  who  found  "types"  of  Christ  and  His 
Church  in  frankly  sensual  Oriental  wedding  songs, 
have  many  sturdy  descendants  among  us  to  this  very 
hour!  Such  preaching  gives  picturesqueness  and  color,  it 
provides  the  necessary  sugar  coating  to  the  large  pill  of 
practical  and  ethical  exhortation.  To  be  sure,  it  does  not 
sound  like  the  preaching  of  our  fathers.  The  old  sermon 
titles — "Suffering  with  Christ  that  we  may  be  also  glori- 
fied with  Him,"  for  instance — seem  very  far  away  from 

211 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

it.  Nor  is  it  to  be  supposed  that  this  is  what  its  author 
intended  the  story  we  have  been  using  to  convey  nor  that 
these  were  the  reactions  that  it  aroused  in  the  breasts  of 
its  original  hearers.  But  as  the  sermonizer  would  doubt- 
less go  on  to  remark,  there  is  a  certain  universal  quality 
in  all  great  literature,  and  genius  builds  better  than  it 
knows,  and  so  each  man  can  draw  his  own  water  of  re- 
freshment from  these  great  wells  of  the  past.  And  in- 
deed nothing  is  more  amazing  or  disconcerting  than  the 
mutually  exclusive  notions,  the  apparently  opposing 
truths,  which  can  be  educed  by  this  method,  from  one  and 
the  same  passage  of  Scripture !  There  is  scarcely  a  chap- 
ter in  all  the  Old  Testament,  and  to  a  less  degree  in  the 
New  Testament,  which  may  not  be  thus  ingeniously 
transmogrified  to  meet  almost  any  homiletical  emer- 
gency. 

Now,  I  may  as  well  confess  that  I  have  preached  this 
kind  of  sermon  lo!  these  many  years  ad  infinitum  and  I 
doubt  not  ad  nauseam.  We  have  all  used  in  this  way  the 
flaming  rhetoric  of  the  Hebrew  prophets  until  we  think 
of  them  chiefly  as  indicters  of  a  social  order.  They  were 
not  chiefly  this  but  something  quite  different  and  more 
valuable,  namely,  religious  geniuses.  First-rate  preaching 
would  deal  with  Amos  as  the  pioneer  in  ethical  monothe- 
ism, with  Hosea  as  the  first  poet  of  the  divine  grace,  with 
Jeremiah  as  the  herald  of  the  possibility  of  each  man's 
separate  and  personal  communion  with  the  living  God. 
But,  of  course,  such  religious  preaching,  dealing  with 
great  doctrines  of  faith,  would  have  a  kind  of  large  re- 
moteness about  it ;  it  would  pay  very  little  attention  to  the 
incidents  of  the  story,  and  indeed,  would  tend  to  be 
hardly  expository  at  all,  but  rather  speculative  and  doc- 
trinal. 

212 


WORSHIP  AND  DISCIPLINE  OF  DOCTRINE 

And  that  brings  us  to  the  theme  of  this  final  discus- 
sion. For  I  am  one  of  those  who  believe  that  great 
preaching  is  doctrinal  preaching  and  that  it  is  particu- 
larly needed  at  this  hour.  The  comparative  neglect  of  the 
New  Testament  in  favor  of  the  Old  in  contemporary 
preaching ;  the  use  and  nature  of  the  expository  method — 
no  less  than  the  un worshipful  character  of  our  services — 
appear  to  me  to  offer  a  final  and  conclusive  proof  of 
the  unreligious  overhumanistic  emphases  of  our  inter- 
pretation of  religion.  And  if  we  are  to  have  a  religious 
revival,  then  it  seems  to  me  worshipful  services  must  be 
accompanied  by  speculative  preaching  and  I  doubt  if  the 
one  can  be  nobly  maintained  without  the  other.  For  we 
saw  that  worship  is  the  direct  experience  of  the  Absolute 
through  high  and  concentrated  feeling.  Even  so  specula- 
tive and,  in  general,  doctrinal  preaching  is  the  same  return 
to  first  principles  and  to  ultimate  values  in  the  realm  of 
ideas.  It  turns  away  from  the  immediate,  the  practical, 
the  relative  to  the  final  and  absolute  in  the  domain  of 
thought. 

Now,  obviously,  then,  devout  services  and  doctrinal 
preaching  should  go  together.  No  high  and  persistent 
emotions  can  be  maintained  without  clear  thinking  to 
nourish  and  steady  them.  There  is  in  doctrinal  preaching 
a  certain  indifference  to  immediate  issues ;  to  detailed  ap- 
plications. It  deals,  by  its  nature,  with  comprehensive  and 
abstract  rather  than  local  and  concrete  thinking ;  with  in- 
clusive feeling,  transcendent  aspiration.  It  does  not  try 
to  pietize  the  ordinary,  commercial  and  domestic  affairs 
of  men.  Instead  it  deals  with  the  highest  questions  and 
perceptions  of  human  life;  argues  from  those  sublime 
hypotheses  which  are  the  very  subsoil  of  the  religious 
temperament  and  understanding.  It  deals  with  those  as- 

213 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

pects  of  human  life  which  indeed  include,  but  include  be- 
cause they  transcend,  the  commercial  and  domestic,  the 
professional  and  political  affairs  of  daily  living.  We  have 
been  insisting  in  these  chapters  that  it  is  that  portion  of 
human  need  and  experience  which  lies  between  the  know- 
able  and  the  unknowable  with  which  it  is  the  preacher's 
chief  province  to  deal.  Doctrinal  preaching  endeavors  to 
give  form  and  relations  to  its  intuitions  and  high  desires, 
its  unattainable  longings  and  insights.  There  is  a  native 
alliance  between  the  doctrine  of  Immanence  and  exposi- 
tory preaching.  For  the  office  of  both  is  to  give  us  the 
God  of  this  world  in  the  affairs  of  the  moment.  There  is 
a  native  alliance  between  expository  preaching  and  hu- 
manism which  very  largely  accounts  for  the  latter's  pop- 
ularity. For  expository  preaching,  as  at  present  practiced, 
deals  mostly  with  ethical  and  practical  issues,  with  the 
setting  of  the  house  of  this  world  in  order.  There  is  also 
a  native  and  majestic  alliance  between  the  idea  of  tran- 
scendence and  doctrinal  preaching  and  between  the  facts 
of  the  religious  experience  and  the  content  of  speculative 
philosophy.  Not  pragmatism  but  pure  metaphysics  is  the 
native  language  of  the  mind  when  it  moves  in  the  spirit- 
ual world. 

But  I  am  aware  that  already  I  have  lost  my  reader's 
sympathy.  You  do  not  desire  to  preach  doctrinal  sermons 
and  while  you  may  read  with  amiable  patience  and  faintly 
smiling  complacency  this  discussion,  you  have  no  inten- 
tion of  following  its  advice.  We  tend  to  think  that  doc- 
trinal sermons  are  outmoded — old-fashioned  and  unpopu- 
lar— and  we  dread  as  we  dread  few  other  things,  not  be- 
ing up  to  date.  Besides,  doctrinal  preaching  offers  little  of 
that  opportunity  which  is  found  in  expository  and  yet 
more  in  topical  preaching  for  exploiting  our  own  per- 

214 


WORSHIP  AND  DISCIPLINE  OF  DOCTRINE 

sonalities.  Some  of  us  are  young.  It  is  merely  a  polite  way 
of  saying  that  we  are  egotistical.  We  know  in  our  secret 
heart  of  hearts  that  the  main  thing  that  we  have  to  give 
the  world  is  our  own  new,  fresh  selves  with  their  cor- 
rected and  arresting  understanding  of  the  world.  We  are 
modestly  yet  eagerly  ready  to  bestow  that  gift  of  ours 
upon  the  waiting  congregation.  One  of  the  few  compen- 
sations of  growing  old  is  that,  as  the  hot  inner  fires  burn 
lower,  this  self-absorption  lessens  and  we  become  disin- 
terested and  judicial  observers  of  life  and  find  so  much 
pleasure  in  other  people's  successes  and  so  much  wisdom 
in  other  folk's  ideas.  But  not  so  for  youth ;  it  isn't  what 
the  past  or  the  collective  mind  and  heart  have  formu- 
lated :  it's  what  you've  got  to  say  that  interests  you. 
Hence  it  is  probably  true  that  doctrinal  preaching,  in  the 
very  nature  of  things,  makes  no  strong  appeal  to  men 
who  are  beginning  the  ministry. 

But  there  are  other  objections  which  are  more  serious, 
because  inherent  in  the  very  genius  of  doctrinal  preach- 
ing itself.  First:  such  preaching  is  more  or  less  remote 
from  contemporary  and  practical  issues.  It  deals  with 
thought,  not  actions;  understanding  rather  than  efficiency ; 
principles  rather  than  applications.  It  moves  among 
the  basic  concepts  of  the  religious  life ;  deals  with  matters 
beyond  and  above  and  without  the  tumultuous  issues  of 
the  moment.  So  it  follows  that  doctrinal  preaching  has  an 
air  of  detachment,  almost  of  seclusion  from  the  world ; 
the  preacher  brings  his  message  from  some  pale  world  of 
ideas  to  this  quick  world  of  action.  And  we  are  afraid 
of  this  detachment,  the  abstract  and  theoretical  nature  of 
the  thinker's  sermon. 

I  think  the  fear  is  not  well  grounded.  What  is  the  use 
of  preaching  social  service  to  the  almost  total  neglect  of 

215 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

setting  forth  the  intellectual  and  emotional  concept  of  the 
servant?  It  is  the  quality  of  the  doer  which  determines 
the  value  of  the  deed.  Why  keep  on  insisting  upon  being 
good  if  our  hearers  have  never  been  carefully  instructed 
in  the  nature  and  the  sanctions  of  goodness  ?  Has  not  the 
trouble  with  most  of  our  political  and  moral  reform  been 
that  we  have  had  a  passion  for  it  but  very  little  science 
of  it?  How  can  we  know  the  ways  of  godliness  if  we 
take  God  Himself  for  granted  ?  No :  our  chief  business,  as 
preachers,  is  to  preach  the  content  rather  than  the  appli- 
cation of  the  truth.  Not  many  people  are  interested  in 
trying  to  find  the  substance  of  the  truth.  It  is  hated  as  im- 
practical by  the  multitude  of  the  impatient  and  despised  as 
old-fashioned  by  the  get-saved-quick  reformers.  Never- 
theless we  must  find  out  the  distinctions  between  divine 
and  human,  right  and  wrong,  and  why  they  are  what  they 
are,  and  what  is  the  good  of  it  all.  There  is  no  more  valu- 
able service  which  the  preacher  can  render  his  community 
than  to  deliberately  seclude  himself  from  continual  con- 
tact with  immediate  issues  and  dwell  on  the  eternal  veri- 
ties. When  Darwin  published  The  Descent  of  Man  at  the 
end  of  the  Franco-Prussian  War,  the  London  Times  took 
him  severely  to  task  for  his  absorption  in  purely  scientific 
interests  and  hypothetical  issues.  "When  the  foundations 
of  property  and  the  established  order  were  threatened 
with  the  fires  of  the  Paris  Commune ;  when  the  Tuileries 
were  burning — how  could  a  British  subject  be  occupying 
himself  with  speculations  in  natural  science  in  no  wise 
calculated  to  bring  aid  or  comfort  to  those  who  had  a 
stake  in  the  country !"  Well,  few  of  us  imagine  today  that 
Darwin  would  have  been  wise  to  have  exchanged  the  se- 
clusion and  the  impractical  hours  of  the  study  for  the 
office  or  the  camp,  the  market  or  the  street. 

216 


WORSHIP  AND  DISCIPLINE  OF  DOCTRINE 

Yet  the  same  fear  of  occupying  ourselves  with  central 
and  abstract  matters  still  obsesses  us.  At  the  Quadrennial 
Conference  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church  held  re- 
cently at  Des  Moines,  thirty-four  bishops  submitted  an 
address  in  which  they  said  among  other  things:  "Of 
course,  the  church  must  stand  in  unflinching,  uncompro- 
mising denunciation  of  all  violations  of  laws,  against  all 
murderous  child  labor,  all  foul  sweat  shops,  all  unsafe 
mines,  all  deadly  tenements,  all  excessive  hours  for  those 
who  toil,  all  profligate  luxuries,  all  standards  of  wage  and 
life  below  the  living  standard,  all  unfairness  and  harsh- 
ness of  conditions,  all  brutal  exactions,  whether  of  the 
employer  or  union,  all  overlordships,  whether  of  capital 
or  labor,  all  godless  profiteering,  whether  in  food,  cloth- 
ing, profits  or  wages,  against  all  inhumanity,  injustice  and 
blighting  inequality,  against  all  class-minded  men  who 
demand  special  privileges  or  exceptions  on  behalf  of  their 
class." 

These  are  all  vital  matters,  yet  I  cannot  believe  that  it 
is  the  church's  chief  business  thus  to  turn  her  energies 
to  the  problems  of  the  material  world.  This  would  be  a 
stupendous  program,  even  if  complete  in  itself;  as  an 
item  in  a  program  it  becomes  almost  a  reductio  ad  ab- 
surdum.  The  Springfield  Republican  in  an  editorial  com- 
ment upon  it  said :  "It  fairly  invites  the  question  whether 
the  church  is  not  in  some  danger  of  trying  to  do  too 
much.  .The  fund  of  energy  available  for  any  human  un- 
dertaking is  not  unlimited ;  energy  turned  in  one  direction 
must  of  necessity  be  withdrawn  from  another  and  energy 
diffused  in  many  directions  cannot  be  concentrated. 
Count  the  adjectives — 'murderous,'  'foul,'  'unsafe,' 
'deadly,'  'excessive,'  'profligate,'  'brutal,'  'godless,' 
'blighting' — does  not  each  involve  research,  investiga- 

217 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

tion,  comparison,  analysis,  deliberation,  a  heavy  tax  upon 
the  intellectual  resources  of  the  church  if  any  result 
worth  having  is  to  be  obtained  ?  Can  this  energy  be  found 
without  subtracting  energy  from  some  other  sphere?" 

The  gravest  problems  of  the  world  are  not  found  here. 
They  are  found  in  the  decline  of  spiritual  understanding, 
the  decay  of  moral  standards,  the  growth  of  the  vindic- 
tive and  unforgiving  spirit,  the  lapse  from  charity,  the 
overweening  pride  of  the  human  heart.  With  these  mat- 
ters the  church  must  chiefly  deal;  to  their  spiritual  infi- 
delity she  must  bring  a  spiritual  message;  to  their  poor 
thinking  she  must  bring  the  wisdom  of  the  eternal.  This 
task,  preventive  not  remedial,  is  her  characteristic  one.  Is 
it  not  worth  while  to  remember  that  the  great  religious 
leaders  have  generally  ignored  contemporary  social  prob- 
lems? So  have  the  great  artists  who  are  closely  allied  to 
them.  Neither  William  Shakespeare  nor  Leonardo  da 
Vinci  were  reformers ;  neither  Gautama  nor  the  Lord  Je- 
sus had  much  to  say  about  the  actual  international  eco- 
nomic and  political  readjustments  which  were  as  press- 
ing in  their  day  as  ours.  They  were  content  to  preach  the 
truth,  sure  that  it,  once  understood,  would  set  men  free. 

But  a  second  reason  why  we  dislike  doctrinal  preach- 
ing is  because  we  confound  it  with  dogmatic  preaching. 
Doctrinal  sermons  are  those  which  deal  with  the  philoso- 
phy of  religion.  They  expound  or  defend  or  relate  the 
intellectual  statements,  the  formulae  of  religion.  Such 
discourses  differ  essentially  from  dogmatic  sermonizing. 
For  what  is  a  doctrine  ?  A  doctrine  is  an  intellectual  for- 
mulation of  an  experience.  Suppose  a  man  receives  a  new 
influx  of  moral  energy  and  spiritual  insight,  through 
reading  the  Bible,  through  trying  to  pray,  through  loving 
and  meditating  upon  the  Lord  Jesus.  That  experience 

218 


WORSHIP  AND  DISCIPLINE  OF  DOCTRINE 

isn't  a  speculative  proposition,  it  isn't  a  faith  or  an  hy- 
pothesis ;  it's  a  fact.  Like  the  man  in  the  Johannine  record 
the  believer  says,  "Whether  he  be  a  sinner  I  know  not: 
but  one  thing  I  know,  that,  whereas  I  was  blind,  now  I 
see." 

Now,  let  this  new  experience  of  moral  power  and 
spiritual  insight  express  itself,  as  it  normally  will,  in  a 
more  holy  and  more  useful  life,  in  the  appropriate  terms 
of  action.  There  you  get  that  confession  of  experience  I 
which  we  call  character.  Or  let  it  express  itself  in  the  ap- 
propriate emotions  of  joy  and  awe  and  reverence  so  that, 
like  Ray  Palmer,  the  convert  writes  an  immortal  hymn, 
or  a  body  of  converts  like  the  early  church  produces  the 
Te  Deum.  There  is  the  confession  of  experience  in  wor-  \ 
ship.  Or  let  a  man  filled  with  this  new  life  desire  to  un- 
derstand it;  see  what  its  implications  are  regarding  the 
nature  of  God,  the  nature  of  man,  the  place  of  Christ  in 
the  scale  of  created  or  uncreated  Being.  Let  him  desire 
to  thus  conserve  and  interpret  that  he  may  transmit  this 
new  experience.  Then  he  will  begin  to  define  it  and  to 
reduce  it,  for  brevity  and  clearness,  to  some  abstract  and 
compact  formula.  Thus  he  will  make  a  confession  of  ex-  \ 
perience  in  doctrine. 

Doctrines,  then,  are  not  arbitrary  but  natural,  not  ac- 
cidental but  essential.  They  are  the  hypotheses  regarding 
the  eternal  nature  of  things  drawn  from  the  data  of  our 
moral  and  spiritual  experience.  They  are  to  religion  just 
what  the  science  of  electricity  is  to  a  trolley  car,  or  what 
the  formula  of  evolution  is  to  natural  science,  or  what 
the  doctrine  of  the  conservation  of  energy  is,  or  was,  to 
physics.  Doctrines  are  signposts ;  they  are  placards,  in- 
dex fingers,  notices  summing  up  and  commending  the 
proved  essences  of  religious  experience.  Two  things  are 

219 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

always  true  of  sound  doctrine.  First :  it  is  not  considered 
to  have  primary  value ;  its  worth  is  in  the  experience  to 
which  it  witnesses.  Second :  it  is  not  fixed  but  flexible  and 
progressive.  Someone  has  railed  at  theology,  defining  it 
as  the  history  of  discarded  errors.  That  is  a  truth  and  a 
great  compliment  and  the  definition  holds  good  of  the 
record  of  any  other  science. 

Now,  if  doctrines  are  signposts,  dogmas  are  old  and 
now  misleading  milestones.  For  what  is  a  dogma?  It  may 
be  one  of  two  things.  Usually  it  is  a  doctrine  that  has 
forgotten  that  it  ever  had  a  history;  a  formula  which 
once  had  authority  because  it  was  a  genuine  interpreta- 
tion of  experience  but  which  now  is  so  outmoded  in  fash- 
ion of  thought,  or  so  maladjusted  to  our  present  scale  of 
values,  as  to  be  no  longer  clearly  related  to  experience  and 
is  therefore  accepted  merely  on  command,  or  on  the  pres- 
tige of  its  antiquity.  Or  it  may  be  a  doctrine  promulgated 
ex  cathedra,  not  because  religious  experience  produced  it, 
but  because  ecclesiastical  expediencies  demand  it.  Thus, 
to  illustrate  the  first  sort  of  dogma,  there  was  once  a  doc- 
trine of  the  Virgin  Birth.  Men  found,  as  they  still  do, 
both  God  and  man  in  Jesus;  they  discovered  when  they 
followed  Him  their  own  real  humanity  and  true  divinity. 
They  tried  to  explain  and  formalize  the  experience  and 
made  a  doctrine  which,  for  the  circle  of  ideas  and  the 
extent  of  the  factual  knowledge  of  the  times,  was  both 
reasonable  and  valuable.  The  experience  still  remains, 
but  the  doctrine  is  no  longer  psychologically  or  biologi- 
cally credible.  It  no  longer  offers  a  tenable  explanation; 
it  is  not  a  valuable  or  illuminating  interpretation.  Hence 
if  we  hold  it  at  all  today,  it  is  either  for  sentiment  or  for 
the  sake  of  mere  tradition,  namely,  for  reasons  other  than 
its  intellectual  usefulness  or  its  inherent  intelligibility.  So 

220 


WORSHIP  AND  DISCIPLINE  OF  DOCTRINE 

held  it  passes  over  from  doctrine  into  dogma.  Or  take,  as 
an  example  of  the  second  sort,  the  dogma  of  the  Immac- 
ulate Conception,  promulgated  by  Pius  IX  in  the  year 
1854,  and  designed  to  strengthen  the  prestige  of  the  Papal 
See  among  the  Catholic  powers  of  Europe  and  to  prolong 
its  hold  upon  its  temporal  possessions.  De  Cesare  de- 
scribes the  promulgation  of  the  dogma  as  follows: 

"The  festival  on  that  day,  December  8,  1854,  sacred  to 
the  Virgin,  was  magnificent.  After  chanting  the  Gospel, 
first  in  Latin,  then  in  Greek,  Cardinal  Macchi,  deacon  of 
the  Sacred  College,  together  with  the  senior  archbishops 
and  bishops  present,  all  approached  the  Papal  throne, 
pronouncing  these  words  in  Latin,  'Deign,  most  Holy  Fa- 
ther, to  lift  your  Apostolic  voice  and  pronounce  the  dog- 
matic Decree  of  the  Immaculate  Conception,  on  account 
of  which  there  will  be  praise  in  heaven  and  rejoicings 
on  earth.'  The  Pope  replying,  stated  that  he  welcomed  the 
wish  of  the  Sacred  College,  the  episcopate,  the  clergy,  and 
declared  it  was  essential  first  of  all  to  invoke  the  help  of 
the  Holy  Spirit.  So  saying  he  intoned  in  Veni  Creator, 
chanted  in  chorus  by  all  present.  The  chant  concluded, 
amid  a  solemn  silence  Pius  IX's  finely  modulated  voice 
read  the  following  Decree: 

"  'It  shall  be  Dogma,  that  the  most  Blessed  Virgin 
Mary,  in  the  first  instant  of  the  Conception,  by  singular 
privilege  and  grace  of  God,  in  virtue  of  the  merits  of  Je- 
sus Christ,  the  Saviour  of  mankind,  was  preserved  from 
all  stain  of  original  sin.'  The  senior  cardinal  then  prayed 
the  Pope  to  make  this  Decree  public,  and,  amid  the  roar 
of  cannon  from  Fort  St.  Angelo  and  the  festive  ringing 
of  church  bells, the  solemn  act  was  accomplished.'"1  Here 
is  an  assertion  regarding  Mary's  Conception  which  has 

1  The  Last  Days  of  Papal  Rome,  pp.  127  ff. 

221 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

only  the  most  tenuous  connection  with  religious  experi- 
ence and  which  was  pronounced  for  ecclesiastical  and 
political  reasons.  Here  we  have  dogma  at  its  worst.  Here, 
indeed,  it  is  so  bad  as  to  resemble  many  of  the  current 
political  and  economic  pronunciamentos ! 

Now,  nobody  wants  dogmatic  preaching,  but  there  is 
nothing  that  we  need  more  than  we  do  doctrinal  preach- 
ing and  nothing  which  is  more  interesting.  The  speciali- 
zation of  knowledge  has  assigned  to  the  preacher  of 
religion  a  definite  sphere.  No  amount  of  secondary  expert- 
ness  in  politics  or  economics  or  social  reform  or  even 
morals  can  atone  for  the  abandonment  of  our  own  prov- 
ince. We  are  set  to  think  about  and  expound  religion  and 
if  we  give  that  up  we  give  up  our  place  in  a  learned  pro- 
fession. Moreover,  the  new  conditions  of  the  modern 
world  make  doctrine  imperative.  That  world  is  dis- 
tinguished by  its  free  inquiry,  its  cultivation  of  the 
scientific  method,  its  abandonment  of  obscuranticisms 
and  ambiguities.  It  demands,  then,  devout  and  holy  think- 
ing from  us.  Who  would  deny  that  the  revival  of  intel- 
lectual authority  and  leadership  in  matters  of  religion  is 
terribly  needed  in  our  day  ?  Sabatier  is  right  in  saying  that 
a  religion  without  doctrine  is  a  self-contradictory  idea. 
Harnack  is  not  wrong  in  saying  that  a  Christianity  with- 
out it  is  inconceivable. 

And  now  I  know  you  are  thinking  in  your  hearts, 
Well,  what  inconsistency  this  man  shows!  For  a  whole 
book  he  has  been  insisting  on  the  prime  values  of  imag- 
ination and  feeling  in  religion  and  now  he  concludes  with 
a  plea  for  the  thinker.  But  it  is  not  so  inconsistent  as  it 
appears.  It  is  just  because  we  do  believe  that  the  discov- 
ery, the  expression  and  the  rewards  of  religion  lie  chiefly 
in  the  superrational  and  poetic  realms  that  therefore  we 

222 


WORSHIP  AND  DISCIPLINE  OF  DOCTRINE 

want  this  intellectual  content  to  accompany  it,  not  super- 
sede it,  as  a  balancing  influence,  a  steadying  force.  There 
are  grave  perils  in  worshipful  services  corresponding  to 
their  supreme  values.  Mystical  preaching  has  the  defects 
of  its  virtues  and  too  often  sinks  into  that  vague  senti- 
mentalism  which  is  the  perversion  of  its  excellence.  How 
insensibly  sometimes  does  high  and  precious  feeling  de- 
generate into  a  sort  of  religious  hysteria!  It  needs  then 
to  be  always  tested  and  corrected  by  clear  thinking. 

But  we  in  no  way  alter  our  original  insistence  that  in 
our  realm  as  preachers,  unlike  the  scientist's  realm  of  the 
theologians,  thought  is  the  handmaid,  not  the  mistress. 
Our  great  plea,  then,  for  doctrinal  preaching  is  that  by 
intellectual  grappling  with  the  final  and  speculative  prob- 
lems of  religion  we  do  not  supersede  but  feed  the  emo- 
tional life  and  do  not  diminish  but  focus  and  steady  it.  It 
is  that  you  and  I  may  have  reserves  of  feeling — indis- 
pensable to  great  preaching — sincerity  and  intensity  of 
emotion,  that  disciplined  imagination  which  is  genius, 
that  restrained  passion  which  is  art,  and  that  our  con- 
gregations may  have  the  same,  that  we  must  strive  for 
intellectual  power,  must  do  the  preaching  that  gives 
people  something  to  think  about.  These  are  the  religious 
and  devout  reasons  why  we  value  intellectual  honesty, 
precision  of  utterance,  reserve  of  statement,  logical  and 
coherent  thinking. 

We  are  come,  then,  to  the  conclusion  of  our  discussions. 
They  have  been  intended  to  restore  a  neglected  emphasis 
upon  the  imaginative  and  transcendent  as  distinguished 
from  the  ethical  and  humanistic  aspects  of  the  religious 
life.  They  have  tried  to  show  that  the  reaching  out  by 
worship  to  this  "otherness"  of  God  and  to  the  ultimate 
in  life  is  man's  deepest  hunger  and  the  one  we  are  chiefly 

223 


PREACHING  AND  PAGANISM 

set  to  feed.  I  am  sure  that  the  chief  ally  of  the  experience 
of  the  transcendence  of  God  and  the  cultivation  of  the 
worshipful  faculties  in  man  is  to  be  found  in  severe  and 
speculative  thinking.  I  believe  our  almost  unmixed  pas- 
sion for  piety,  for  action,  for  practical  efficiency,  betrays 
us.  It  indicates  that  we  are  trying  to  manufacture  effects 
to  conceal  the  absence  of  causes.  We  may  look  for  a  re- 
ligious revival  when  men  have  so  meditated  upon  and 
struggled  with  the  fundamental  ideas  of  religion  that  they 
feel  profoundly  its  eternal  mysteries. 

And  finally,  we  have  the  best  historical  grounds  for  our 
position.  Sometimes  great  religious  movements  have  been 
begun  by  unlearned  and  uncritical  men  like  Peter  the 
hermit  or  John  Bunyan  or  Moody.  But  we  must  not  in- 
fer from  this  that  religious  insight  is  naturally  repressed 
by  clear  thinking  or  fostered  by  ignorance.  Dr.  Francis 
Greenwood  Peabody  has  pointed  out  that  the  great  re- 
ligious epochs  in  Christian  history  are  also  epochs  in  the 
history  of  theology.  The  Pauline  epistles,  the  Confessions 
of  Augustine,  the  Meditations  of  Anselm,  the  Simple 
Method  of  How  to  Pray  of  Luther,  the  Regula  of  Loyola, 
the  Monologen  of  Schleiermacher,  these  are  all  manuals 
of  the  devout  life,  they  belong  in  the  distinctively  reli- 
gious world  of  supersensuous  and  the  transcendent,  and 
one  thing  which  accounts  for  them  is  that  the  men  who 
produced  them  were  religious  geniuses  because  they  were 
also  theologians.1 

It  is  to  be  remembered  that  we  are  not  saying  that  the 
theologian  makes  the  saint.  I  do  not  believe  that.  Devils 
can  believe  and  tremble;  Abelard  was  no  saint.  But  we 
are  contending  that  the  great  saint  is  extremely  likely  to 

1  See  the  "Call  to  Theology,"  Har.  Theo.  Rev.,  vol.  I,  no.  1, 
pp.  1  ff. 

224 


WORSHIP  AND  DISCIPLINE  OF  DOCTRINE 

be  a  theologian.  Protestantism,  Methodism,  Tractarian- 
ism,  were  chiefly  religious  movements,  interested  in  the 
kind  of  questions  and  moved  by  the  sorts  of  motives 
which  we  have  been  talking  about.  They  all  began  within 
the  precincts  of  universities.  Moreover,  the  Lord  Jesus, 
consummate  mystic,  incomparable  artist,  was  such  partly 
because  He  was  a  great  theologian  as  well.  His  dealings 
with  scribe  and  Pharisee  furnish  some  of  the  world's  best 
examples  of  acute  and  courageous  dialectics.  His  theo- 
logical method  differed  markedly  from  the  academicians 
of  His  day.  Nevertheless  it  was  noted  that  He  spoke 
with  an  extraordinary  authority.  "He  gave,"  as  Dr.  Pea- 
body  also  points  out,  "new  scope  and  significance  to  the 
thought  of  God,  to  the  nature  of  man,  to  the  destiny  of 
the  soul,  to  the  meaning  of  the  world.  He  would  have 
been  reckoned  among  the  world's  great  theologians  if 
other  endowments  had  not  given  Him  a  higher  title." 1 

It  is  a  higher  title  to  have  been  the  supreme  mystic,  the 
perfect  seer.  All  I  have  been  trying  to  say  is  that  it  is  to 
these  sorts  of  excellencies  that  the  preacher  aspires.  But 
the  life  of  Jesus  supremely  sanctions  the  conviction  that 
preaching  upon  high  and  abstract  and  even  speculative 
themes  and  a  rigorous  intellectual  discipline  are  chief  ac- 
companiments, appropriate  and  indispensable  aids,  to  re- 
ligious insight  and  to  the  cultivating  of  worshipful  feel- 
ing. So  we  close  our  discussions  with  the  supreme  name 
upon  our  lips,  leaving  the  most  fragrant  memory,  the 
clearest  picture,  remembering  Him  who  struck  the  high- 
est note.  It  is  to  His  life  and  teaching  that  we  humbly 
turn  to  find  the  final  sanction  for  the  distinctively  re- 
ligious values.  Who  else,  indeed,  has  the  words  of  Eternal 
Life? 

1  "Call  to  Theology,"  Har.  Theo.  Rev.,  vol.  I,  no.  1,  p.  8. 

225 


LYMAN  BEECHER  LECTURESHIP 
ON  PREACHING 

YALE  UNIVERSITY 

1871-72    Beecher,    H.    W.,    Yale    Lectures    on    Preaching,    first 

series.  New  York,  1872. 
1872-73    Beecher,  H.  W.,  Yale  Lectures  on  Preaching,   second 

series.  New  York,  1873. 
1873-74    Beecher,   H.   W.,   Yale   Lectures   on    Preaching,   third 

series.  New  York,  1874. 
1874-75    Hall,  John,  God's  Word  through  Preaching.  New  York, 

1875. 
1875-76    Taylor,  William  M.,  The  Ministry  of  the  Word.  New 

York,  1876. 

1876-77    Brooks,  P.,  Lectures  on  Preaching.  New  York,  1877. 
1877-78    Dale,  R.  W.,  Nine  Lectures  on  Preaching.  New  York, 

1878. 

1878-79    Simpson,  M.,  Lectures  on  Preaching.  New  York,  1879. 
1879-80    Crosby,  H.,  The  Christian  Preacher.  New  York,  1880. 
1880-S1     Duryea,  J.  T.,  and  others  (not  published). 
1881-82    Robinson,  E.  G.,  Lectures   on   Preaching.   New  York, 

1883. 

1882-83     (No  lectures.) 
1883-84    Burton,  N.  J.,  Yale  Lectures  on  Preaching,  and  other 

writings.  New  York,  1888.* 

1884-S5     Storrs,  H.  M.,  The  American  Preacher  (not  published). 
1885-86    Taylor,  W.  M.,  The  Scottish  Pulpit.  New  York,  1887. 
1886-87    Gladden,  W.,  Tools  and  the  Man.  Boston,  1893. 
1887-88    Trumbull.   H.    C,    The    Sunday    School.    Philadelphia, 

1888. 
1888-89    Broadus,   J.   A.,    Preaching   and    the   Ministerial   Life 

(not  published). 
1889-90    Behrends,  A.  J.  F.,  The  Philosophy  of  Preaching.  New 

York,  1890. 

227 


LYMAN  BEECHER  LECTURESHIP 

1890-91     Stalker,  J.,  The  Preacher  and  His  Models.  New  York, 
1891. 

1891-92    Fairbarn,  A.  M.,  The  Place  of  Christ  in  Modern  The- 
ology. New  York,  1893. 

1892-93    Horton,  R.  R,  Verbum  Dei.  New  York,  1893.* 

1893-94    (No  lectures.) 

1894-95    Greer,  D.  H.,  The  Preacher  and  His  Place.  New  York, 
1895. 

1895-96    Van  Dyke,  H.,  The  Gospel  for  an  Age  of  Doubt.  New 
York,  1896.* 

1896-97    Watson,  J.,  The  Cure  of  Souls.  New  York,  1896. 

1897-98    Tucker,  W.  J.,  The  Making  and  the  Unmaking  of  the 
Preacher.  Boston,  1898. 

1898-99    Smith,  G.  A.,  Modern  Criticism  and  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. New  York,  1901. 

1899-00    Brown,  J.,  Puritan  Preaching  in  England.  New  York, 
1900. 

1900-01     (No  lectures.) 

1901-02    Gladden,  W.,  Social  Salvation.  New  York,  1902. 

1902-03    Gordon,   G.  A.,  Ultimate   Conceptions  of   Faith.   New 
York,  1903. 

1903-04    Abbott,  L.,  The  Christian  Ministry.  Boston,  1905. 

1904-05     Peabody,  F.  G.,  Jesus  Christ  and  the  Christian  Char- 
acter. New  York,  1905.* 

1905-06    Brown,  C.  R.,  The  Social  Message  of  the  Modern  Pul- 
pit. New  York,  1906. 

1906-07    Forsyth,  P.  T.,  Positive  Preaching  and  Modern  Mind. 
New  York,  1908* 

1907-08    Faunce,  W.  H.  P.,  The  Educational  Ideal  in  the  Minis- 
try. New  York,  1908. 

1908-09    Henson,    H.    H.,    The    Liberty   of    Prophesying.    New 
Haven,  1910.* 

1909-10    Jefferson,   C.   E.,   The   Building  of   the   Church.   New 
York,  1910. 

1910-11     Gunsaulus,  F.  W.,  The  Minister  and  the  Spiritual  Life. 
New  York,  Chicago,  1911. 

1911-12    Jowett,  J.  H.,  The  Preacher;  His  Life  and  Work.  New 
York,  1912. 

1912-13     Parkhurst,  C.  H.,  The  Pulpit  and  the  Pew.  New  Haven. 
1913* 

228 


LYMAN  BEECHER  LECTURESHIP 

1913-14    Home,  C.  Silvester,  The  Romance  of  Preaching.  New 

York,  Chicago,  1914. 
1914-15    Pepper,  George  Wharton,  A  Voice   from  the  Crowd. 

New  Haven,  1915  * 
1915-16    Hyde,  William  DeWitt,  The  Gospel  of  Good  Will  as 

Revealed   in    Contemporary    Scriptures.    New    York, 

1916. 
1916-17    McDowell,  William  Fraser,  Good  Ministers  of  Jesus 

Christ.  New  York  and  Cincinnati,  1917. 
1917-18    Coffin,  Henry  Sloane,  In  a  Day  of  Social  Rebuilding. 

New  Haven.* 

1918-19    Kelman,  John,  The  War  and  Preaching,  New  Haven.* 
1919-20    Fitch,  Albert   Parker,   Preaching  and   Paganism.   New 

Haven.* 

*Also  published  in  London. 


229 


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BRATTLEBORO,  VERMONT,  U.  S.  A. 


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